Glitter and Guttertrash

The year they died

2011-09-17T04:27:00.001+10:00

There was a night in Berlin last year- Autumn, October-ish, grey streets and everyone grumpy with the season-change flu- when I sat in the kitchen of the tiny flat I was staying in and smoked ten cigarettes and drank three beers, fast, and said nothing. Stared at peeling paint. Thought nothing. One of the women I was staying with hovered anxiously by me but it took ten cigarettes and three beers before I could speak.

My friend had died. Killed herself. The fabric of the world had shredded itself and there she had gone. Was never coming back. I had just found out.

I smoked instead of crying, and drank beer instead of talking. She was the third that year (or was she the second, and the third came just after? I don't remember, now).

A bus. Cancer. A choice. One, two, three.

(Four, five: a motorbike, a flight of stairs: four and five were acquaintances, not friends, but faces in my social fabric).

They stumble off my tongue awkwardly sometimes. There is no easy way to talk about your dead friends, no way they don't kill (hah) the conversation. OK, that's not always true: sufficiently drunk, and in the company of other people with dead friends, they trip lightly off the tongue and my grief becomes glad for a moment of being able to mention them. I hate that without the alcohol, and without the company of other people with dead friends, they are unmentionable. Like an STI or money problems: my dead friends, so awkward. Which is so stupid, because all of them were so good at talking, so good at making the conversation roll- why should death steal that too?

I think of one every time I dance to Michael Jackson. Every single fucking time (and I dance to Michael Jackson a lot, these days). I think of her when I see sparkling girls with particular wide smiles and pointed elbows, and every time a friend tells me about her roller derby dreams, and every time I am brave and do something I want to do but don't think I can do.

I see another out the corners of my eyes every time a dancefloor carries me away and the music is just right, and I am wrapped up in the clever trickery of the DJ, the pure artistry, and I want to look up and see her laughing at us carried away with her- or sneaking behind us on the dancefloor to lift me up in her arms or steal somebody's hat. Cheeky motherfucker that she was.

They're not important for what I remember of them. My friendships with them were only tiny parts of their lives, and not at all important compared to the many things that made them whole and alive and worth grieving. But my grief, and my memories, and my desire to talk about them sometimes at the bar without bringing the conversation to a screeching halt: that's all I've got. I don't get to check them out on Facebook any more and see how they're going, or run into their girlfriends and ask after them, or make plans to catch up for coffee next time I'm in the country.

2010. One, two, three (four, five) dead friends. 2011: the year I keep trying to learn how to remember them right.

Hello I am ALIVE!

2011-01-05T22:05:00.006+11:00

It's been such a long time, but there's no way I could have forgotten. It's all still there, waiting to rush back at me: the filthy-handed battles to get plants in before the light fades, the frantic and expensive trips to the gardening centre, the anxious clucking over seeds a little slow to germinate. And the rich green smell of tomato leaves, the glistening of water drops on neatly staked seedlings, and the ferocious explosion into being of bean plants- rocketing out the soil, cracking it in their haste, still wearing their seed-covers as hats as they bellow "Hello! I'm ALIVE!"- as though the fierceness of life in them could go unnoticed anyhow.

I have purloined some space in a friend's front yard for a hasty little veggie garden, and a gigantic pot in another yard to grow some greens. I've struggled to stay away from the perfection-obsession of my earlier gardens. To settle for the seeds from the store rather than hunting down the best and most special seeds online, to focus on getting a few plants in and growing rather than drawing and re-drawing plans for the maximal use of space, to allow that growing something is good enough.

it's been barely four weeks since my friend told me I could use her yard, and I am giddy with it all (of course) but managing to hold the obsession in check (I hope). The row of beans (Scarlet Runner, Purple King & a backyard heirloom snakebean I begged off a friend's mum) is heading fast for the heavens, the chard and mustard are leafing out in their shadows, the zucchinis are putting on size at their usual alarming rate and opening their first flirty boy-flowers, the tomatoes have set a few little fruits (the random compost tomato has, at least- the store-bought varietals are taking their time), and the sole slug-surviving cucumber is throwing out tendrils in search of fences to climb.

I built the garden on top of work already done. My friends had, a few weeks earlier, pulled all the weeds out of it, laid newspaper, and covered the lot with straw mulch (before running out of ideas about what to do with the yard next, which they happened to mention within my earshot, and OBVIOUSLY that opportunity wasn't going to pass me by). With not much time or budget, I went for a straightforward option of layering a few bags of chicken & cow poo on top of the existing mulch and laying more straw on top of that, then planting seeds & seedlings into pockets of compost opened up in that mix, which roughly equates to a standard lasagne-style raised bed recipe. I've been a little concerned about soil fertility so the plants have been getting at-least-weekly seaweed-based organic fertiliser, but so far nothing like nutrient deficiencies is showing up and everything's looking as happy as one could expect from a hastily-assembled veggie garden in a narrow front yard in Newtown.

My first harvest was a fistful of chard and mustard leaves sliced into a miso soup. They were delicious, of course, but almost beside the point. I am back again in a place where I get breathless with excitement as I report on the progress of bean vines up bamboo stakes and the formation of little flower buds on the stumpy twisting zucchini vines, and that is easily worth everything.

So many things I don't know

2010-11-26T21:58:00.002+11:00

There's this girl who runs away a lot.

She's very good at endings, and sort of good at beginnings, and pretty much rubbish at the bits in between.

She's pretty smart (she's always heard) but feels like an idiot, like she doesn't get it, that there is a cosmic It that is beyond her getting, that living is making shit up fast enough to speed along without ever getting It, without ever having read the manual, it's about passing the exam all the time when you never even glanced over the notes.

And life for her is like this thing that happened a lot in highschool, where there were some things that came so easy: standing up in front of a class to present a talk, except she hadn't done the research and had barely glanced at the assignment topic before she walked in to present, but her brain (easily distracted) stores a thousand cross-referenced details easily summoned into something like a compelling argument, with a grin and an emotion and some inspiring peak to end on, and she wouldn't just pass, she'd get A's.

And walking out she'd wonder, did she think less of herself for scamming it like that? Did she think less of all of them, the students and the teachers, for not seeing through her? Or was that just it, was that just success, these things that came easily and meant nothing and said nothing?

And ten years later, is that still success? Rattling and breezing your way through life on the path of least resistance and least effort and constant, surprising success, and the constant, wearing questioning of if it's you or them you judge most harshly for letting you get away with it?

My friend's a florist, I've written about her before. One day recently we were driving in her car and I was basking in the radiance of her success, of where her passion's taken her. I felt the threads of envy in me, envying her passion, envying that she had a thing that could direct her somewhere and give her- gifted, talented girl to whom success in other fields came easily- something a little difficult to do, and strive for, and succeed at. She's been a lot of other things before she became a florist, and we talked about that. We talked about the things that come easy, and the restlessness with them, and I saw that she had stepped beyond those and decided to do something else. I envied her.

I don't mean anything by this, except to take note of this progression. A few years ago I noticed that I was learning how to learn for the first time in my life. That for the first time in my life I was learning that in order to learn, you must first be really bad at something, and that being bad at it is the necessary first stage of actually learning how to do it. I realised that I have rarely learned anything at all, because so many things are so easy for me, and the risks of turning my attention to anything that starts off being hard have seemed so high, that I have been content to succeed at things that aren't success at all- just, a kind of meaningless on-going. The career I have when I'm desperately trying not to have a career, for example. It's one of the gifts the world is willing to grant a person with a vault of educational and circumstantial privilege supporting them, and I haven't earned it, I take it for granted, and I go nowhere with it.

So I learned, in short order, how to ride a bicycle (by first acknowledging that I did not know how to ride a bicycle, and that I would be bad at riding a bicycle as a necessary pre-cursor to being good at riding a bicycle). I learned about vegetable gardening, and karate, and how to swim across an open bay. I learned a little bit of driving cars, a little bit of speaking German, a little bit of organising an autonomous festival. Eventually, I learned a little bit of actually showing up to my jobs, a little bit about caring about my work, a little bit of doing more than taking these free gifts for granted.

And now the vistas ahead hold something like a piece of knowledge: that the things that come easily are not necessarily the things I ought to be doing. That ease is not, perhaps, the best indicator of a thing worth my time and effort.

Because another thing happened this year, which is that a lot of people I know died, and even more people in my not-very-extended community died. It was a rash of deaths, a relentless hammering of names and circumstances and gaps and losses- all different, all unrelated- all shining people I have loved. And I'm not even 30 yet (not even nearly-30) but I have a chronic illness that will almost certainly shorten my life, and a lot of my friends have died this year, and I know something like life is not forever. There isn't endless time. And maybe there's not actually enough time to coast, the way I've been doing for my entire life to date. Maybe coasting, maybe ease, isn't actually the best way to use up this short bank of years I'm granted.

I'm still stewing on these thoughts, still wondering what they mean. Still wondering if this Summer->Summer hemisphere-switching life is like being on hold all the time, and if I really have time for that. And if I don't, what do I have time for? If the things that come easy and effortless aren't the right things to do, then what ARE?

Borrowed love

2010-11-15T23:20:00.004+11:00

There aren't many cats in Berlin. It's a dog's city, for sure. You can take your dog everywhere (when I get off the plane I grin at the rows and rows of dogs sitting patiently beside owners inside the airport, waiting for their people to appear).

When I lived in the big hospital squat last year my room was on the same level as an enormous puppy, a great shaggy Swiss Mountain Dog, already a giant at four months old. She was the friendliest dog I'd ever met in Berlin, puppy-eager and sweet, and liked to hurl herself at my feet, legs splayed for a belly-rub. Adored by the household. She could bring a tense house meeting to a warm and fuzzy standstill just by existing. When I visited her in her new apartment this year she had grown massive, but still threw herself into a delighted wiggling mess at my feet, and throughout the summer proved that she remembered me by occasionally dragging her owner towards me across busy marketplaces, footpaths and intersections.

Other dogs: the grey-muzzled Boxer down at the wagenplatz, followed everywhere by the cry: "Zita, NO!" as she aimlessly knocked over shopping carts, beer bottles, and tins of paint in her aimless wanderings. The maudlin Greyhound I often dog-sat, plagued by a deep and depressive malaise at almost all times, until the occasional moments at the park where for 35 seconds he'd remember that he was a puppy once, and erupt into a foot-flapping, tongue-wagging sprint- then stop, a few hundred meters away. Drop his nose to the ground. And return to his sulk.

In the house in Brisbane that fulfils some function of 'home' when I'm there, there was a lovely crested cockatiel, miniature relation of a cockatoo, who bobbed his head and danced as I attempted to teach him how to whistle. I never succeeded at getting him to mimic me, but he certainly would screech would I stopped whistling. And in the two weeks spent teaching him, I became a much better whistler than I've ever been before.

Berlin, again, my last few days there this time around. I was in a tiny, dark warren of an apartment, borrowing a room from a friend. In the hallway, in a cage, lived a guinea pig. He didn't show many signs of wanting to make friends, but whenever he heard the fridge door open in the kitchen up the hall he'd let out the most unearthly, inorganic squeals and beeps, like a UFO landing. This seemed to be a signal that I should feed him slices of cucumber, which he'd tug out of my hands with his teeth and scarper back into his house to eat.

In Sydney I sit in my parents' backyard while their multi-coloured flock of chickens scratch at the grass around my feet (one, the oldest and sweetest, will eat mulberries from my hands). Like glossy-feathered dinosaurs with their proud carriage, tiny eyes and tiny brains, fierce reptilian dignity.

Last weekend I was at a picnic, and a rabbit appeared. A tame, soft, lop-eared rabbit. We couldn't find where she'd come from, and we couldn't find anyone to take her in, and we certainly couldn't leave her in the park to become fox food, so I took her to my friends' house for the night. A week later she's settled in as though she's always belonged there, all soft fur, curious whiskers, lively company. House-rabbit happy, nothing like the bored, vegetative lumps living in tiny cages that I met often as a child. I feel a little bit like her fairy godmother.

Fold & Roll

2010-10-27T13:40:00.003+11:00

On Tuesday the 14th of October I was sitting on Sonnenallee in Berlin, drinking a comfortingly awful coffee (Berlin coffee is generally awful, unless it's from one of the couple of Australian-run cafes that ex-pats share between them as survival secrets, which often leads to tears and exclamations of joy as someone sips down their first Sydney-quality soy latte in months or years). It was from a Lebanese bakery around the corner from the house I'd been staying at for a few days, in the company of a sweet friend who took me on a rooftop adventure over the apartment buildings a few days before. Then I boarded a plane to London, and rolled myself and my (small) suitcase of worldly possessions along to a pub with a queer night to meet another friend, whose place I stayed at for two nights. Then two days on a plane. Two days in Sydney, crashing with more friends, days spent bleary-eyed and jet-lagged and wondering what the hell I was doing there. Then two days in a car with my parents, driving up the coast. Then a night at my sister's house, in the land of my nieces. A night at my friend's house in Brisbane. Then three nights on the Sunshine Coast, beach-front apartment, salt-water swims, moonrise over the ocean, extended family everywhere, my sister's wedding (I was a bridesmaid). Then Brisbane, for two nights. I leave tonight, back to Sydney for a job interview, and I know where I'll be sleeping tonight, but I have no idea about tomorrow night, or any night after that.

In that great rush and jumble of places and people streaming past me, I am so relieved to have so many places, in so many parts of the world, that fulfil some function of home. The flat in London that I know so well now, having slept on it's living room floor on every journey into and out of Europe. Friend's houses in Newtown in Sydney, and West End in Brisbane. Neighbourhoods that are familiar, places where I know the location and quality of the nearest coffee shop, transport systems I know how to navigate, kitchens that I've cooked in before. It's like packing myself up into my little rolling suitcase and unfolding myself like a page from a pop-up book in each new place, but not unfolding too much- need to keep track of all the parts of me so I can fold up again and roll on. But folding out enough to wash my clothes, take liberties with the tea and coffee, spend a day being not-much-of-a-guest (lurking in a bedroom on the net rather than presenting sunny and interesting to the world). Living in transit. It's not a holiday. It's nothing like one.

Without people willing to share their space with me, who seem to enjoy my flittering periodically through their houses and their lives, there would be nowhere that felt like home, and I love these people for their generosity and for making my life possible. For making it OK when I am a jet-lagged mess of uncertain destination and geographic angst, for picking up our friendship easily from the last time I came through and listening (with interest, even!) to my attempts to pull a coherent narrative out of where I've been and where the hell I might be going.

I cling to the familiar faces (although haircuts and names and pronouns may change) and familiar spaces (although the rooms might have been shifted) to ease the jolt of hemisphere-shifting shock, which wants to drown me in the weirdness of leaving autumn for spring, colder for warmer, a world where I make and sell hats for a living for a world where I am landing interviews for corporate IT jobs that pay amounts of money that make my eyes water. Heavy-laden apple-trees swapped for jasmine blooming. Autumn harvests for fresh spring shoots. Fantasies of baby tomato plants ready to shoot strong and green for the hot, bright heavens.

What I want is still out over the ocean somewhere, not quite caught up with my body yet. I have a plan, formed in Berlin, for a summer of work here and an early spring return to Berlin, but the ability to think of or hold onto plans lingers behind like my body clock when I travel like this, catching up with me maybe a few weeks later. Who I was and what I did in Berlin is behind there too, somewhere, making it hard to say much when people ask me how it was ("Oh, good, I guess. I love that city."). So life is extremely immediate, with a 48 hour bubble of vision of where I will go and I what I will do, and that's good enough for now.

Food For Many Friends

2010-09-28T05:00:00.008+10:00

Coming back from the Copenhagen festival, where somehow the enormous camp kitchen (feeding 300 a meal) became my refuge among the political intensity, I knew I wanted to get involved in a voku project in Berlin. I have always loved voku culture here (volkskuche: people's kitchen), have intended to get more involved than just turning up & eating at the various vokus around town, but hadn't quite made it happen yet. But the Copenhagen experience of turning my mind to the problem of turning 20kg bags of dried pulses, 20kg bags of rice, 1kg tubs of spices, and crates and crates of vegetables into healthy, tasty food for enjoying together, and for fuelling the activity of the entire festival, was so invigorating- like a game of practical Tetris, of how long must this cook for/how many burners do we have/how do you drain a pot of simmering beans that weighs 30kg without burning anyone/protein carb ratios/deliciousness considerations that I came back determined, and found a voku in search of a co-ordinator, and put my name down, and got to it.

I've overseen two vokus now, and I love it. It's stressful for sure, and hard work, and I am so glad that my life in Berlin allows me the time to dedicate two days to each one, but I love it. My Wendy-complex thing about making sure all the Lost Queers of Neverland are healthy and well thrills to the sight of great groups of us sitting together and eating and talking. And it isn't just bringing people together to eat, it's bringing people together to cook- every voku attracts a handful of volunteers, and my job is to supply them with ingredients, instructions, tools, and time and space to sit together chopping veggies, peeling fruit, and talking.

So, as the co-ordinator, my first job is planning a menu. My first voku, this was my menu:
* Puerto Rican-ish beans, mostly following this recipe
* Tofu-based soy sour cream (3 blocks of tofu, a good glug of oil, juice of one lemon, splash of soy milk, salt, pepper, stick-blended til smooth & creamy)
* Fancy brown rice (brown rice cooked with carrots, turmeric, onion, garlic, and stock)
* Potato & Spinach salad
* Green salad with an AMAZING tahini dressing produced by somebody who blended an apple into it, which I have never seen done before but made for fantastic flavour & texture
* For dessert, a peach and mango crumble & an apple crumble.

Then I need to figure out shopping, which means figuring out quantities. This involves figuring out what's essential, and what's variable. I was planning to feed 40. Here's the quantities of the essentials that I bought:
* Beans: I bought 6kg, which when soaked & cooked was WAY TOO MUCH. Next time I will buy 3kg for 40!
* Rice: 3kg was a good quantity- we nearly ran out, but not quite.
* Tofu: 3 standard-sized tofu blocks, size of which I can't remember, was a good quantity but remember this was just for a dressing/side-dish. I'd get at least 8 blocks if it was the main protein.
* Onions: 2kg is a bare minimum for this quantity of cooking
* Garlic: 6 heads, again, a bare minimum- at least 4 full heads go into a cooked main dish for 40, and you want some left over for salad dressings & things.
* 1L of cooking oil
* 6 lemons
* So much more that I can't precisely remember!

The way the menu plan works is to pretty much decide on a protein & a carbohydrate, and then dumpster/skip/scrounge/see what can be had for a box-per-euro from the markets for the veggies & fruit portions. So we had potato-and-spinach salad rather than just potato salad cos I skipped a box of good spinach, we had mango, peach and apple crumbles because I got all of those fruits in large quantities out of a dumpster, and the green salad is made up of whatever looks good & cheap (generally it's pretty difficult to dumpster lettuce worth eating, so that gets bought, but tomatoes, cucumbers, salad onions, peppers/capsicums and so on are frequent dumpster scores).

The markets in Berlin around closing-time are full of people scrounging throw-outs for voku purposes. I do a lot of "swap half my box of tomatoes for half your box of peaches" type deals. Usually the only limit on how much food I dumpster or get for a euro-per-crate is how much I can carry home- 20kg is my limit with a backpack & a bicycle, but if I find myself a bike trailer and/or panniers I could go more. Another person with another backpack would also help!

I usually make two trips for food, one to the markets for the dumpster/scrounge/buy veggies portion, then another to actual shops for beans, tofu, brown rice, cooking oil & so forth. Both times I fill up my backpack with at least 20kg worth of food. It seems to have worked out pretty well that 2 x 20kg backpack-loads of food= enough food for voku (OK, I confess that I have always cooked too much and there is always left-overs, but that hasn't been a problem because I do voku at a living project where they are quite happy not to have to cook dinner the next day).

So usually I do the market-trip the day before voku and deliver that load, then do a super-market run and drop that off, then if there are beans to put on for soaking I do that. Then I get up the next morning & run around picking up tofu (which can only be had from the Asian grocery here), brown rice (which can only be had from the expensive Bio shop- Berlin you are so frustrating this way!), coconut milk or whatever else I couldn't find at the supermarket or market, then I arrive at the wagenplatz at about 1pm. The aim is to have dinner served by 6pm, but, um. I have never had it on before 7pm.

I like to think that as I do more I will get better at calculating time-requirements over time. Dinner has been delayed by, the first time, the long cooking-time of a large quantity of brown rice, and the second time by the long cooking-time of curry-for-40. Lesson learnt: LARGE QUANTITIES OF FOOD TAKE LONG TIMES TO COOK, and strength of the burner matters! It can take over an hour for a large saucepan of rice or curry to come to a boil, and it needs to boil before it starts cooking, so add another hour onto that at least, and remember to get your rice & your curry on before 4pm if you want to serve at 6!

So at 1pm I am scurrying around setting up the cooking-space for when my volunteers arrive. I set up a compost bucket, veggie-washing stations (large saucepans or buckets filled with water for washing dumpster-scunge off veggies), chopping boards & knives. Whenever my volunteers arrive (it can be variable!), the first one ALWAYS gets the job of chopping the onions & garlic, because they will take a long time but need to be done before I can start cooking the hot dishes. Then everyone else gets to wash, sort, chop the ingredients. This usually takes HOURS. Like, way longer than you'd imagine. But it's fun & social, if also occasionally gross (depending on how well a bag of dumpstered veggies has held up to transport & overnight storage. Sometimes there is slimy badness).

Ah, and when I did the beans-from-dried-beans, I got those on cooking before I even started assigning volunteer jobs, because I knew they'd take forever. That 6kg of beans took about 3 hours of cooking after an all-night soak- not bad, actually.

So the order goes like this:
1. If there are dried beans, put them on to cook
2. Chop LOADS of onions & garlic
3. Wash & chop the rest of the veggies for cooked dishes
4. Get the cooked main dishes cooking- which means, get the onions & garlic cooking at least, even if the rest of the veg is still being prepped
5. And the rice on- I liked putting the rice on an outside burner so that it could be watched by people while they were making salad, and I'm running around inside the kitchen looking after a few cooked dishes.
5. So by now the extra hands are prepping the salad veggies & dressing
6. And dessert fruit is being washed & prepped
7. While the cooked dishes are still cooking (it takes forever, I told you) and I remember about side-dishes and dressings
8. So salad is made, dessert crumbles are ready to go into the oven, side-dishes are prepped, rice is finished, but cooked dishes are STILL cooking (and people are looking hungry) so...
9. Send somebody over to set up the serving-space with stacks of plates, bowls, knives & forks
10. Have somebody set up the washing-up station with a big tub of hot, soapy water & a drying rack
11. And somebody else writes up the menu with basic important ingredients (all of my dishes have been vegan but I list if they have soy or wheat or nuts in them)
12. Then HOPEFULLY the main dishes are finally cooked, and all the food can be carried over
12. And I remember that I need to put out a donation jar to recoup the cost of the shopping and
13. Finally, dinner is served
14. Except that I am usually still keeping an eye on dessert, and bring that over about halfway through dinner.

Then, finally, it is time for sitting & eating & drinking beer & soaking up a feeling of accomplishment.

Having only done two voku, I'm clearly not an expert on the topic. I'm still muddling my way through things like quantity calculations. I'm also pretty ambitious, and tend to be overly focused on deliciousness & variety over convenience or cheapness. If this was a fund-raising voku I might have to be a bit less focused on things like buying brown rice (which is healthier & tastier but for some reason also about 3x more expensive in Berlin than white rice), and it's possible that if I was doing it every week I might be more interested in basic, nutritious food (like the classic dahl + rice + salad voku menu) than going on some culinary adventure every single time. I know that if this was a regular gig that I was coordinating (which may well happen) I'd do longer-term planning and do things like borrow a friend with a car to buy bulk quantities of onions, oil, rice, spices, pulses & other basic stock foods- which would make it both cheaper & also less hassle for me than running around acquiring everything from scratch every two weeks.

For the sake of record-keeping, here is my menu for this past week, with basic notes:
* Tofu palak "paneer" (basic spinach curry with pre-fried pieces of tofu pretending to be paneer)
* Seitan + potato + cauliflower curry, following spice/gravy guides for a generally 'meaty' curry- I cooked the seitan at my place the night before (see what I mean about making things more difficult for myself than they need to be?) then pre-fried it before adding it to the curry
* Fancy brown rice again, as above
* Tofu-based soy raita, pretty much the tofu sour cream recipe above only with more lemon juice & a whole bunch of mint added
* Salad with a tahini garlic dressing
* Stewed peaches/nectarines/apricots with tapioca-coconut pudding for dessert.

Given that it turns out that I love doing this ('organisational masochist' says one friend, but I prefer to think of it as the Wendy groove of making sure all the Lost Queers are fed and healthy and happy enough for their big adventures) it seems likely that I will take it on as a regular thing once I'm long-term settled here. I have ambitions already to move from the vat-cooking-for-many model to more creative and intensive individual-items-for-many world (samosas for 50! Lasagnes for 60! WOOO!). If I do that I'll blog it, because the internet is definitely in need of more feeding-the-hungry-crowds resources.

Hats

2010-09-16T10:58:00.003+10:00

Dirt cheap crafty bitch

2010-09-16T05:15:00.006+10:00

Autumn-and-broke-Berlin, like, AGAIN. I spent a bit of time being down on myself about it, feeling shit about it, wondering how it was that I came to be in the same city in the same dire financial situation a whole year later, after being in so many other cities and so many other financial situations in between. Wondering where I went wrong, why every single one of my 'get a life & a job & some cash' plans sank with the summer sun, again. Watching the cold-and-rain set in with leaking boots and not enough warm clothes, again. But as much as it's doubly depressing to be here (AGAIN) it's twice as easy to yank myself out of the depression (again) because I know I got past it last time, and I'll get past it again.

And meanwhile, the cold sets in and the craft-urge twitches itself awake, but whoa, wait a second, crafting is expensive! Yarn costs a shitload of money! What's a flat-broke crafter to do?

Recycle yarn, of course! The freeboxes* of this city are brim-full of gigantic, heinous, lumpy wool sweaters and scarves made from a fuck-ton of lovely, salvageable yarn. The bigger & lumpier the original garment, the better- the more likely you are to be able to harvest satisfyingly huge skeins of unbroken wool from them. The other day I pulled apart a 3 meter pink scarf into a ball of unbroken wool the size of a soccer-ball.

I use the recycled wool to make hats (with button-on beards, and ears, and ear-flaps, and sometimes with the faces of brain-eating monsters), and sometimes I even manage to sell those hats, which improves my financial situation in tiny increments. I don't recommend crafting to anybody as a primary way to support yourself, unless you're for some reason happy to value your labour at a couple of euros an hour, but as a way to edge through the tight bits (one hat sold= the groceries, in some hungry weeks), it doesn't suck too bad.

Mostly though it thrills me that I don't need to give up crafting just cos I run out of cash. Where there is a willingness and the patience to unpick, there is always a way to craft.

*Freebox: the shelf, messy corner, or literal box in a squat, housing project or WG where people dump their no-longer-loved clothes, shoes etc to be picked over by other people who may love them. Or destroy them and make hats out of them. Like a charity shop, but free-er and a fuckload less jesus-y.

Berlin- at night- with a dog.

2010-08-31T11:25:00.001+10:00

I run, pulling the reluctant dog behind me. Sprinting and laughing up cold streets, feeling the blood pump in my legs and then get caught somewhere in my guts, in a knot inside my ribcage. My legs are strong from pushing my ridiculous antique bike fast up hills, but my lungs are weak from cigarettes and a life of drifting. Still- now, on this night, half-drunk and delighted- I run, push against the knot, pull the dog along behind me. He is a greyhound, built for speed but deeply averse to it, is confused by the puppyish urge in me to push out into the night. He wants to curl up on familiar pillows in familiar warmth. He feels betrayed, he thought I was just taking him out to empty his bladder- which he has promptly done, copiously, against the potted plants outside the bakery down the street- doesn't know what to do about my boots pounding faster and faster against the pavement, my voice whispering and calling and urging him on. But he follows, not quite fast enough, trailing and anxious, and I run and laugh ahead, daring him and myself with each new block and each new corner and the one ahead, faster and faster at first and then, feeling the knot in my side, the burn in my lungs, the reluctant body at the end of the leash, I drop into a canter that he can nearly keep up with. We run until we've run out of street and have come to the canal, come to cold and dark, unlit, where the swans float somewhere unseen and the ducks roost against the concrete banks, where a mist rises because the air has cooled faster than a broken promise and the water, warm still, sighs into it. My feet hit a different surface, sinking into dirt and mud rather than uneven stone, and I relent at that. Stand for a moment, let him sniff and piss and push his confused nose into my hand, then turn and run with him all the way back home. I remember with the clacking of his long toenails on the stairs back up to our apartment that I'd meant to call my lover tonight, meant to offer some time, but I am my own internal galaxy just now- blood and breath and wild, scattered thoughts- I call instead to say, don't come. The dog hauls himself onto his couch, adoring reproachful eyes and hesitant tail-twitches, and I kick my shoes off and call the night my own.

QFCPH2010

2010-07-30T08:11:00.004+10:00

I'm sitting in a little wooden dwelling made by joining two wagons together, nestled into an overgrown corner of the free city of Christiania. I haven't left it at all today, except to use the toilet in the building next door, and to stand among the weeds in the little yard and brush my teeth (a hedgehog emerged from the weeds as I did that, the first time I've seen one coming towards me rather than running away: easily the best part of my day).

I had this plan to take a break today from the busy, overwhelming festival I've been involved with, but today was not the break I'd planned. Instead of lush time and sleep, sweet company and battery-recharging and the casual capacity to return to the festival whenever I liked, I am entirely alone, trapped and suffocated by something like anxiety and something like stunned static and something like exhaustion.

This week three people were arrested and came extremely close to being deported as a result of a chain of events I was involved in closely enough to feel responsible, remorseful, helpless, and so so sorry.

While I was offline for a few days over the weekend it came to light that a woman who very closely matched my vital statistics had died in a crush at a music festival in Germany. My parents thought that it was me who had died there. By the time I found out they had cleared it up by finally managing to get in touch with DFAT, so I received the entire wave of that story, my possible death and the relief at my continued life, in one hit. It is something of a shock to discover that you have been thought dead by your family while actually you were just hauling yourself at painfully early hours to busses and ferries and festival construction sites.

Yesterday, worn thin and incapable of engaging anymore with the big work of the festival, I coordinated cooking lunch for 200 people instead. As a break from dealing with crisis conflict management and the grinding guiltburden of friends in jail. Then I worked the bar for 5 hours. It is possible that the tears I left the site in, finally, had more to do with exhaustion than interpersonal stress.

So, today. This dithering anxiety-space, and the fact that I don't have a way to ride my fix-a-bike to the shop (no lock: no bike), means I have consumed nothing all day but water and dry muesli. I don't feel refreshed or recharged at all. I feel alone and jumpy and afraid. Prisons and (possible) death and violent encounters lurk in my brainspace, that kind of shit gets real sensation of stomach-in-freefall that I am not very good at dealing with. Or at least: not very good at turning my back on for long enough to enjoy something sparkly and distracting. Two more days of festival, though: I guess I'll give it a shot.

Berlin. Again.

2010-07-21T22:41:00.003+10:00

I loved this city for the first time in late Autumn, and I'm glad for that. I tumbled off a plane from the US, planning a bit of a jaunt around Europe on my way home, but I landed in Berlin & refused to leave. Even cold, empty and windswept, this city felt right. And fuck but I needed that comfort, after a year's hard slog trying to make San Francisco work for me, and mostly failing. I mean, I figured SF out in the end, found a few friends, found a few comfortable spots, lined up some dates, got a job- learned that city and learned how to make it (kind of) fit, but it was hard work. Always hard work. It should've worked for me (where else to Go West, Young Queer, when you're a baby femme pervert hunting for her people?) but it didn't... quite. Oh well.

Berlin, though. Berlin in late Autumn, dark all the time, bare trees, greasy canals, grit and graffiti and fuck you everywhere on the streets, Berlin felt like home. The first week, all alone and avoiding nosy Eurotour teens in my hostel, I walked and walked and fell in love. Hauled some bad, basic German out of the depths of my memories of high-school education, enough to buy a felafel and a beer and a packet of cigarettes, got on with falling in love. The second week I found a play party, found some of my people, found a place to stay. But they were secondary comforts to the just-right-fit of being alone on these streets.

It's the height of Summer now. My third time in this city, which gets stickier each time, makes itself a little more obviously home. Summer in Berlin is a different beast. It's so easy to love this city in Summer. The sun never sets and there is so much light in the day in which to sit somewhere beautiful and engage in the imperative Berlin activity of doing absolutely fucking nothing. A long hard day of doing absolutely fucking nothing followed by a long hot night of whichever option you choose from the non-stop of buffet of bars or parties or- what I mostly choose- nothing at all. But I'm glad I loved this city in her down-time first, that it wasn't the glamour-dazzle of the easy-living Summer that got me in, that I can love this bright and golden time and watch it slip away and know that I love the next time just as much.

The thing about coming to Berlin is this: I tell people in Sydney, or London, that I'm off to Berlin for four months, and people say, "What are you going to do?" and I have no idea how to answer them. You get to Berlin and say you're here for four months and nobody asks you what you're going to do because, well, it's obvious isn't it? You're going to do that strange, perfect mash of nothing-much-maybe-an-art-project-and-a-bit-of-work-and-bike-riding-and-lake-swimming-and-LIVING that this city makes so possible. I'm going to wander off to the markets on Tuesdays and Fridays and drink my coffee on a platform surrounded by the trendy globetrotters watching a jazz band play and swans cruise the canal. I'm going to throw in a hand with the DIY queer film festival, haul crates of beer and dig trenches and whatever else needs doing. I'm going to jump on a bus to Budapest because they need queers from this metropolis to support their bruised & assaulted Pride. I'm going to spend weeks looking for the perfect bike. I'm going to sleep, and cycle, and cook, and happen upon people I want to see, and stand at the top of beautiful bridges at 4am watching electrical storms rip open the sky and not worry about getting up for work in the morning.

And I'm going to keep planning the big jump, the time that I will come here and stick for real. I'm looking for the threads of life here that stretch beyond a Summer or an Adventure. I spend a day up a cherrytree in my friend's Kleingarten (harvesting a 10 kilo haul that is half what the tree produced last year, but still enough to keep his friends in jam all year) and realise that it is more possible, more achievable for me to acquire a Kleingarten of my own, put down roots and prepare and love a piece of dirt here, than it is to do it in Australia. This blows me away, and I fall in love with this city a little harder. I work on my German, slowly, and look up language schools so I can get good enough to wrestle with the bureaucracy that I may stay, with employers that I may work, with my Kleingarten neighbours that we may swap tools & seeds & wisdom. Good enough, eventually, to make local friends in their native tongue.

I am having a golden-glowing time, a truly happy time, with splinter irritations of accommodation and money and love dynamics but nothing that steals away the light of being here, of having successfully brought myself back here, of the pride I have in each new set of roots that spread out of me into this city, of being the kind of person I need to be in order to live this life that I feel such true love for.

I call myself geographically commitment-phobic or location polyamorous, wrinkle my face up and shrug when people ask where in the world I'm likely to be in this month of that year. I have no idea. The shift from nomad, passer-through, to migrant is a hard one, with high walls to scale. But every time I go back to Australia I know that I belong there a little less, and every time I am here I belong a little more, and it becomes less a matter of 'returning home' than acknowledging that I already know where home is, and doing whatever it is I need to do to stay.

There is never enough time

2010-05-14T12:22:00.005+10:00

One day last year, not long before I left the country, some friends took over the Hub in Newtown and blasted Michael Jackson all day long. It became a massive street party, drawing in passers-by, people laughing with delight at how ridiculous and lovely it was. Clouds came over in the afternoon and it started pissing down rain- most people ran but me and a little handful of other people stayed, helped scramble the equipment under cover then kept dancing in the pouring rain. I'd never really danced to Michael Jackson before (god, I am such a music snob I'll walk off the dancefloor rather than join in the exuberant silliness), but I made the effort that day. I copied the moves off the beautiful ladies I was dancing with, who knew how to make it fun, how to make it gorgeous, how to dance with elbows flying and giant smiles and manage the moonwalk on slippery wet footpath.

I got to work yesterday morning and opened up the newspaper at my desk and that was how I found out, that the pretty lady with the gorgeous moves and the tight red short-shorts who danced in the rain with me for hours to Michael Jackson was gone. Just like that. A smiling photo of her pulled from her Facebook page, printed in the paper, and that was how I found out.

It's never fair. It's never right. It's never anything less than the bottom falling out of the world, because happy, silly, brilliant people who shine with the fulfilment of some platonic ideal of full of life aren't meant to just go, like that. Like a black hole has opened up on the dancefloor and swallowed them away.

"It's always a couple, every year, and it's never OK" said my friend who came to sit with me in the sunshine and talk about these jagged empty spaces that happen in our networks, suddenly. Maybe people who you loved, but loved sometimes, when you happened to see each other, on dance-floors or passing on the street or across in the sunshine at a picnic. Or maybe people who you loved always, who were part of the fabric of every day, whose absences are canyons. Or maybe people who were only sometimes glimpsed, but who were loved fiercely by people you love, and you are gripped with sadness for the grief of your friends.

Our networks sprawl and encompass and we are so many, and we connect in so many moments, tiny and profound, and when we lose somebody the whole network shudders with the pain of it. Concentric circles of pain, flowing outwards: her girlfriend & her family. Her team. Her fabric-of-every-day-friends. And onwards, outwards, to people who hung out with her a few times, a while back, and thought she was lovely and thought she had some pretty winning moves, dancing to Michael Jackson on the street in the rain.

I have never really done 21st century mourning before. I flicked over to her Facebook page and underneath hundreds and hundreds of messages that travelled agonisingly from entreaties to come back and keep fighting to- horribly- eulogies, underneath all that there are her last couple of postings, a few comments on some people's photos, excitement about an upcoming match, and it is almost obscene to see it laid out like that: the sudden, impossible shock of it.

And it turns out that for all I have pulled away from the network, the immense sprawl of people I know (in some ongoing project to try to figure out what the difference is between a person I know and a friend), for all that I haven't been out much, have rarely been seen, have hardly bothered to seek anyone out beyond a tight, tiny handful, it still hurts brutally to feel the loss. You are all supposed to still be there, even if I don't bother to come find you. You are all supposed to be dancing and laughing and living and carrying on without me so that I might see you on the street sometime and stop to chat and we can feel the little glow of knowing each other, in the different ways we've known each other.

There is no way to metabolise the vanishing, the absence. There are platitudes and truths and old and new rituals but there is no restoring the order of the way things ought to be.

We are fragile. We are precious. There is never enough time.

Meat

2010-05-08T22:41:00.001+10:00

I've had a lot of very strange thoughts about meat recently. This is a part of a thing I'm writing to try to sort them out:

I stared at the people walking away with their portions of animals in boxes and marvelled at their audacity. I was overwhelmed by the intimacy of what they were about to do with those animals. I imagined it like leaning into a lover and, rather than kissing them, tearing a chunk out of their cheek, their breast, their thigh. I shivered with the knowledge like I was watching them walk away to fuck. It was so obvious that the consumption was about possessing it and owning it and obliterating it in the face of desire and appetite- how could anyone ignore how sexual that was? How could they pretend it wasn't blatantly and self-evidently pornographic to do it in public?

Checking in the weather:

2010-05-03T22:01:00.003+10:00

Before I left my last stable household and went traveling, I used to lie in bed at night and feel the weight of all the things that I owned pressing down on my chest, muffling me, sending me to the edge of open panic. I was responsible for these things, for this enormous volume of stuff that defined my physical reality. I was tethered by it all.

Sometimes since I left that last house and got rid of all my things I have felt the panic of grasping for what the fuck it means to be me- what am I, after all, without routine, objects, space, familiarity? But that panic has never been so tangible, so real, as the panic of all those things weighing me down.

I have been thinking about this because it's been a year now. I am in Sydney again (still?), in another transient, sub-letted space, working a job and saving my money and preparing to leave again. A year seemed like as good a length of time as any to check in with myself, with how this is going: this traveling, transient, life-in-motion. A life of minimal objects, few plans, and no continuity of space.

Here is the weather-report on that: I am happy. Happily in motion. I am so comfortable in other people's sub-letted or loaned spaces now that I barely notice they are not my own (my own space? What's that?). Some spaces are nicer or more convenient or better fits than others, but the essential state of them not being mine and not being stable is bothering me not at all. That's a nice thing to know.

I have learned this: that there is such a thing as 'my space', and it's important. It can take the form of a closed door for a specified number of hours, or me carrying myself off to a cafe with the crosswords for the afternoon, or occupying a corner of a room with my computer on my lap- it's more flexible than I ever imagined. But I do need it. That the frictions of living with other people's furniture and other people's kitchens fade fast into the background, but I need a few hours to myself & some quality time with my computer sometimes, or I fall apart.

The strangest thing in my life right now is that I am working. I have a job, a real, grown-up job, and it's not like it's the first one of those I've ever had but it is the most surprisingly pleasant one I've ever had. I am astounded to spend so much time being this competent, capable, professional self and to take pleasure in it, even. I think this is one of the first times full-time work has ever felt like anything other than pulling teeth without anaesthesia. It is both a relief to experience (LOOK! Maybe I CAN be a proper, fully-fledged capitalism-participating human being one day!) and a bit of an identity shock (Whoa! Am I a radical queer pretending to be a good corporate worker-bee, or a good corporate worker-bee pretending to be a radical queer?). It is, right now, replenishing the financial stores for another summer stint of radical queer traveling roadshow, but I can almost imagine it being something else. Something like, a lifestyle choice, ongoingly. And that is weird as hell to contemplate.

So. No gardens or recipes or fabulous outfits to recount, right now. I am all about this trippy-as-fuck experience of working-and-liking-it, and about being this small, streamlined, transient little life with few dependent objects, few social connections, few markers of my passage. I am preparing to go again, but I know that the going isn't more important than what I'm doing in the time between now and then. This is all Journey, wherever I am in the world.

Vegan Coconut Macaroons

2010-04-03T17:01:00.003+11:00

I've been craving macaroons fiercely lately. No idea why. It's all phantom smells of coconutty goodness baking and anticipating the glorious meeting of coconut, sugar, and my tongue.

So anyway I made some! I followed this recipe for vegan macaroons, which was really easy- took about 15 minutes to get them in the oven.

I pulled them out of the oven about 5 minutes ago and have already eaten 7, so I give this recipe a thumbs up! Except- they could be sweeter, for sure. I'll add another tablespoon of icing sugar next time I make them, and go heavier on the vanilla essence.

As you can see I didn't have any baking paper so I dropped teeny-weeny spoonfulls into teeny-weeny cupcake cases, which seems to have been a good strategy. They hold together remarkably well for something eggless, and haven't stuck to the paper at all.

I am still in Australia, and it's bothering me. I've been having such a lovely time, and I really don't want to ruin that by outstaying my desire to be here! It's hard to leave Australia once you're here though- nothing to do with comfort or happiness, it just costs about $2000 to leave. And much as I've been trying, I don't presently have $2000. Sigh. Job applying, recruiter-pursuing, job-interview-attending bullshit ensues.

True Love Grows

2010-03-20T15:50:00.004+11:00

I have a friend who loves flowers. She loves flowers, true-love style. She goes to the flower markets to buy a certain number of flowers for a certain number of uses and falls helplessly in love, so that she comes home, arms full, heart full, and surrounds herself with many more flowers than she had planned. Flowers are her business but they are also her heart, and her art, and can it ever be money wasted when she loves them so much?

I went to the markets to buy a coffee today. I went with the naughty feeling in my heart of knowing myself, and knowing that although a coffee was all I should buy that I would not be successful. My eye would be caught and my heart would open and I would spend much more than I should.

I love vegetables. I love them. I love markets full of different colours, different textures, like an art gallery of all the possible forms vegetables can take.

(I love gardens filled with these forms even more- so much more- but markets will do)

I remember the last heirloom tomato I bought. It was in Berlin, in September, from the Turkish markets where some serious, rough-handed German women stocked a stall full of beautiful vegetables. I bought tomatoes of every colour and shape from them all Summer, and in Autumn I bought the last: a heavy oxheart, pinky-red, the size of my clenched fist. I hoarded it from my housemates and ate it like caviar, like ambrosia, like it was precious.

I bought a tomato today that weighs 700g all by itself. It is ridged and swirled, pink with green shoulders, out of a basket that said "mixed pinks". It cost me more than a few beers at my favourite pub. It is beautiful, and I love it. I love it now, before I eat it (I hope I love it when I eat it, too, but that's almost beside the point).

I bought myself a bouquet of swirled green and purple kale, too, crinkly and lush. A bag of fragile sherbet-coloured mushrooms.

I feel like such a wanker sometimes, caught up in this community of food affluence. As though this foodie-gardener obsession, this true love, is such an upwelling of unjustifiable privilege. I am embarrassed at myself, at the depth of my enthusiasm. I cringe a little away from all the connotations of this obsession, from the great spreading mass of foodies and heirloom snobs and and people who love hippy-style 'alternative'-ish little organic markets which are just so darling and sell fair-trade organic coffee and feature pretty girls playing ukeleles and where almost everybody there, apart from some stall-holders, is white, and rich, and spends a lot of money to gain access to this 'alternative' space.

But the love is true, and the caring is real, and knowing and loving and growing food make my life better. They make me more human, and happier. I can't imagine a gift more beautiful than a bouquet of kale and a bowl of wild-shaped tomatoes.

Other People's Gardens

2010-03-17T23:15:00.004+11:00

Sometimes I think I could spend decades trying to escape the echoes of old loves, and still fail.

That bewilderment, that perpetual shock of an unjust universe, is the way I understand that I am human- I think- or just the way I know my irrational heart.

(those hands, those eyes, that tenderness, that concern, witnessed at a distance: the unbearable plodding-on-ness of the world, that people continue to live and love, declining to politely cease and vanish once their scar has been struck into me, that the assembled scars decline to cease aching, still, after all this time.)

Old gardens haunt me too, and the gardens I haven't planted because I have made other choices in my life.

These chillies come from plants in the garden I built in the sharehouse that was my home, plants I planted and tended through their first summer of life. They have survived my absence, thrived- the lushest and most productive part of the garden now is this patch of chilli plants, heavy with new crops of ripe fruit from October to March and setting another crop still in Autumn.

I take liberties in this garden when I visit. My hands are possessive when I tend the plants. I harvest baskets full of chillies and freeze them for the household to use. Nobody asks me to, or gives me permission. I think that taking this liberty is a declaration of a sort of belonging, and belonging in that way makes it easier that I don't properly belong anywhere. I've been living on couches and fold-out beds and in living rooms and tents for so long now, floating on the current of the hospitality of others, I would come apart I think but for taking these small liberties that mean belonging.

I bought punnets of new herbs for this garden, outraged and a little judgemental that nobody had planted basil yet when I arrived back in Sydney in December (imagine having the space to grow basil and not doing it! Imagine a whole summer of cooking without fresh basil when you could grow it right there!). I visit regularly to pinch out the growing tips and pull off the snails. We frame it as a gift, my way of saying thank you to the household for hosting me as their guest, but I don't think the gift is for anyone but me. I planted rosemary, too, to replace the three huge & lush rosemary plants that died in the heatwave just before I came back (and try not to dwell on how gutted I was to see them dead- remind myself that this is what happens when you leave your plants, and go away. They weren't mine anymore, not to tend and not to mourn).

I drift through Sydney like this, half-belonging and half-alien. Connected and yet anticipating nothing more than the moment of departing again.

I spend a lot of hours walking the long way from place to place and spying on people's gardens as I go. There's one man's front yard that I know well- I notice when he replaces his broad beans with tomatoes, and the tomatoes with beans grown up strings on his porch (we've chatted a few times, over the fence). I pick out the gardens that have mint growing weed-like through the paving stones, and rub my hands over people's rosemary hedges. Sometimes I write fan mail and leave it in the letterbox ("Your edible garden is fantastic- well done- thanks for putting these plants on the street! xx another gardener").

I wanted to photograph this pomegranate tree in a front yard in Enmore for its beautiful heavy fruits. The owner of the tree came bustling out of her house, shouting at me, implying that I was intending to steal one of her lovely pomegranates, distrusting my stammered assurances that I only wanted to admire it. Somewhere between my stammers and her possessive bristling I discovered that the tree was about ten years old, planted on her return from a trip to Lebanon, where she had admired the pomegranate groves. "It has beautiful flowers, too" she told me at last, grudgingly. It's hard for gardeners not to warm to each other, a little bit.

A few blocks later on the same walk, taking a street I haven't taken before, I found that someone had planted a riot of mints and basils and nasturtiums along the narrow council verge, all the way down the block. It was so beautiful I wanted to roll in it like a happy dog, but I didn't of course. I leaned in close to it instead, breathed in its smell, crushed leaves of chocolate mint between my fingers and rode the memories of where that scent took me. Kept walking, wondering if these fragments of other people's gardens could keep me going, and for how long.

This definitely counts as cheating at gardening.

2010-03-13T16:06:00.003+11:00

This is not a secret. I am not the first person to suggest this, out on the internet (I probably got the idea from somebody else, to start with). But I figured it was worth passing on again, for people who do not already know:

It is really, really, REALLY easy to grow spring onions by cutting off the root bits of a store-bought bunch, and planting them into some potting mix.

I mean it. Cut off the root bits of the spring onion, leaving about 3cm of stalk, stick the root bits into some potting mix with the stem-bits poking out above the surface, place in a somewhat sunny position, water, and watch 'em grow. New edible leaves will begin emerging immediately, and be ready to eat within a couple of weeks.

Considering you probably buy bunches of spring onions all the time for eating, and probably cut the root-ends off & chuck them in the compost, this is basically NEW PLANTS FOR FREE.

I've done this at least 3 times, and it's always been successful. One batch got left behind when I moved house, one batch eventually flowered, and one batch is still going a year later (although a little straggly now because the potting mix they're in is old and infertile now, and nobody remembers to water them- but still, they grow!).

So I should probably say things like: look for fresh, healthy spring onions, and ones where the roots look nice & intact. But to be honest I've never seen it make a difference. I've grown new plants from manky spring onion bunches that were already old & tired looking at the grocery store, and then sat in a dodgy sharehouse fridge for a week.

Compared to growing from seed, this method is a total winner. The few times I've tried starting spring onions from seed they took forever to come up, then came up as pin-thin strands that grew oh-so-slowly, and weren't even close to being table-ready when some ravenous slug or snail turned up and ate the whole pot-full of them. It was a recipe for frustration. This method made me much happier. Hooray for fast returns!

This post today was inspired by my passing this tip on to my parents yesterday at the greengrocer ("you should grow spring onions. In fact, you should grow them from that bunch you are buying right now"). As you can see, they have now planted the root-ends of that bunch, and are hopefully well on their way to a never-ending supply of fresh, free spring onions.

Adventuring on home turf

2010-03-02T02:14:00.003+11:00

In the past month I have been writing more by hand- with a pen, on paper!- than in a long, long time. Normally I would say I HATE writing by hand. My handwriting is painfully slow compared to my ridiculously fast typing speed (I can type as fast as I think- that is the truth), and being unable to erase, go back, rewrite as fast as my brain is coming up with revisions and better phrasings is frustrating. It feels clumsy. Plus, what I write on my computer exists, for real, either here or in an email or in a folder somewhere, where it will be backed up and stored and revisited. What I write on paper tends to get lost and scrunched up at the bottom of bags and forgotten about.

But this past month I have been loving writing by hand. I have been far from my computer for long stretches of time, doing beautiful things and wanting to remember them. Scrabbling for a pen and writing it out on the back of an envelope, or the back of a stack of embroidery stitch guides, or on torn-out pages of somebody else's notebook. It's been nice. When I write by hand I use names fearlessly, and write narratively about what's happening (can you imagine?).

I went to an island for five days. It was so beautiful, and I had such a nice time, becoming filthy and salt-encrusted and wild. Living out of a backpack, hiking up treacherous broken tracks to hidden secret lagoons, swimming in warm, clear bays and tannin-lakes like baths of tepid tea. I lay on a picnic table one night staring at the stars and thought I am completely happy with every decision that has led to me being the person who is lying here right now.

I drove back to Sydney crammed onto a bench seat between a friend who chose not to speak a word that day, and the extremely chatty driver of the campervan who was giving us a lift. He was a stranger, but a decent one. It's hard to come back from an adventure like running away to a tropical island, but it's been good to be back in Sydney for a bit.

In the just-over-a-week since I've been back I came up with & performed a show, my first solo show in 3-ish years, which felt amazing. I ran away from Mardi Gras Fair Day to the beach to watch brightly-dressed hipsters race each other on inflatable rafts on a day that sparkled across the water like a diamond. I went to a film festival on the roof of an abandoned, squatted motel on a beautiful warm night, watched the slice-of-orange moon set behind trees, Chinese New Years fireworks shoot up over the city, flying foxes flapping fat and clumsy overhead. On that rooftop I loved my life, my friends, the night and this city.

The morning after Mardi Gras I woke up on three hour's sleep and went to the beach in a car-load of friends from the house I once lived in. The sky was dark and the water was gun-metal grey, the beach almost empty. We swam naked. It rained, after a while, ferociously heavy, warm rain, which looked beautiful from below the surface. I swam for the first time in ages in goggles but not a snorkle, and rediscovered how good it feels to fling myself down right to the bottom of the water and float among the fish and kelp until my lungs are pounding and ears popping. When we slid out of the water into the rain my body didn't feel like anything had changed- as though I was still submerged, the air exactly as wet and warm as the ocean had been.

I have had sad days, in the past week. Everything is not golden- far from it. But there have been more golden moments, shining so bright and beautiful, than I can remember experiencing so close together in a very long time. I have been writing them down on paper, mostly, because I have not been around my computer much. But I can tell you about them here, as well, for double-extra-guaranteed remembering. And hopefully when I read back on this I will remember enough to fill in the spaces I have left blank, in the writing of it.

Lost plants & lost stories

2010-02-28T04:50:00.002+11:00

It's hard to blog now. It's been hard for a while, but the reason why becomes clearer and clearer: success seems contingent on being a mystery, and I suck at mystery. I want to talk all about everything that happens, but that's not OK. Or at least. That's complicated, it complicates things. And for all that I shine sometimes when I am saying FUCK YOU to what I am meant to do, I am also drawn in by "supposed to". I am not supposed to talk about things.

It was easier when I had plants to talk about. Delightfully impersonal, but still all the elements of good story-sharing. Tension, struggle, growth, reward.

Haven't had a garden for a while. Am not likely to. No plants, sorry. No good garden stories.

Except... except in a grim, dark mood the other day I walked past a garden bed outside a train station I used to live near, in Sydney, and in that garden bed I saw these strong and flourishing plants. Their vitality and colour caught my eye. Three swiss chard, and a russian kale, well and truly out of place in a low-maintenance succulent-based council garden bed. And I remembered, suddenly, planting them there months and months ago, tiny fragile seedlings tucked into an inhospitable home, so that I would have something to care for down in that distant-feeling corner of the queer universe.

I gave them worm castings in their planting holes, and mulched them with compost from my old sharehouse compost bin, but after that first planting they were left mostly to fend for themselves. Sometimes I passed by to water them, but I wasn't around much anyway, and then I was overseas- not around at all- I forgot them. But they grew, so big and strong that they caught my eye walking past 8 months later, and I remembered them, remembered digging in those beds and that dry, sterile soil on my hands. They looked thirsty but strong, after all these months. It's been a hot summer in Sydney, but they did well, all on their own.

My mood lifted, seeing them. I thought they look very edible. They could feed people. And that always feels amazing, to have planted a seed that grew into food.

I wonder about the path I have chosen for the next few years, of being neither here nor there, of paring myself back to a backpack and one or two outfits. It's not who I was, and it's hard to be, but the hardest thing is giving up land to cultivate. Giving up the stability of a garden. It's easy to give up being the girl who competes with the prettiest dresses and the cleverest ideas. It's hard to give up being the girl with the lushest garden.

I chose this. I chose to give up the possibilities of a garden and what that would mean for permanence and that particular vein of growth that is dependent on stability. It didn't feel like the right time to go down that path. And I am glad I have walked this other path, but it's hard to convince myself that it's worth it, to stay on it. For all the amazing things I have done, that I couldn't have done if I'd stayed, and for all the amazing futures I can envision for this- being a girl in motion- it is hard to be close to the gardens I loved once and continue to turn my back on them.

And I can't tell you about the other things, because they're not all mine to tell, and I am so painfully aware now of everybody else's ownership of their stories. It makes for bad blogging, this secrecy and mystery. I'm not very good at it. So meanwhile... have some stories about plants. They do mean something. They mean a lot to me. I can tell you about that.

Driving Cars

2010-02-04T18:15:00.002+11:00

I am 27, and I am learning to drive.

I feel like a child, strapped in beside my father, clutching awkwardly at the wheel. 27 years a passenger, 10 years wilfully ignoring this rite of late-adolescent passage, 5 years delighting and righteous in my ignorance, 2 years slowly clawing my way through a list of things I never learnt how to do (bikes, electric drills, gardens, yarn crafts): and here it is, the pinnacle of all terrifying skills. Me, behind a wheel, in charge of a car.

It is easier than it always seemed in those nightmares of driving I have suffered: turning the car on, making it go, stopping it again. Of course. The whole world does it, it can't be that hard. But it is an entire new physical skillset, one I have no context for, and the learning curve is steep.

This sharp edge of the learning curve is exhilarating. The leap from knowing nothing to knowing something is enormous, and fast. The leap from knowing something to knowing a little more. The very, very beginnings of a sense of familiarity (3.5 hours into something that most people my age have spent thousands and thousands of hours doing already).

Dad directs me up and down the same stretch of mostly-empty street, tucked in next to a sports field. U-turn, go back again. U-turn, go back again. Remember to indicate. Check the mirrors. Constantly surprised at how hard I have to haul at the wheel, that it goes around more than once, that there is a thing called a full lock and just the right moment to come out of it. A quiet mantra to myself: I am in Australia. We drive on the left. I am in Australia. We drive on the left. Because every time I let the mantra slip, I direct myself confidently and proudly to the right, as though I am riding my bike cocky and brave along Berlin streets.

I am cautious, and my caution throws my dad right off. He has taught several teenagers to drive already, spent hundreds of hours tempering their immortal bravado, but my snails-pace refusal to use the accelerator, the way I slam my foot on the brake every time I want to have a think about what I'm doing, tests his patience. I know too much of my own mortality to find this easy.

U-turn, back again. U-turn, back again. Learning how to track line markers through the windscreen, what a straight line feels like, how to keep the tires on the pavement, how to track my gaze through the mirrors. Freak out occasionally. Scare myself by hitting the accelerator rather than the breaks, once, and know I'll probably never make that precise mistake again. Pull in, park here. Reverse, three-point turn, go round again. Pull in, park here, reverse, three-point turn, go round again. Go faster (no!). Go faster (NO!). Go on, use the accelerator (DON'T WANT TO).

Cars pass me. Pedestrians pass me. Dogs pass me, and kids on bikes. People who do not use their indicators pass me. I do not run into anybody. I do not run into the guard rails. I drive directly over the gutter at one point, early on, but it is a small disaster. There is no damage. Dad laughs at how I show my fear by becoming stern and silent and perfectionist. I am thrilled when I do the same thing for the 16th time and feel, for the first time, a smoothness and flow to it.

Three driving lessons in. I am no driver yet, but having learnt in these past few years more than anything else how to learn, I am beginning.

For all the girls I've been, so far:

2010-01-05T22:32:00.010+11:00

In 2003 I was 20 years old (nearly 21! I would have told you, absolutely determined not to be young). I was dating a 6 foot tall motorbike rider I called Daddy, and running gleefully amok as the tiny femme sidekick of her band of strapping, packing butch warriors. That year, just after Christmas, we decided on the spur of the moment to pack up the cars and head north to something called "Tropical Fruits". I'd never heard of it, but I trusted that crew to provide a quality adventure. We went north, and at a party full of the kindest queers I had ever met, dancing between rolling green hills, a little bit of my urban armour chipped open, and my life changed.

I missed the next year's party because I was just about to pack off to San Francisco (for a year, although I didn't know that yet)- that New Years I partied in Sydney instead. The year after, though, I went north again, drawn by that beautiful land, those beautiful people. Then again the next year. Those two years I went with my trusty adventure-friend, and we found our own way- staying at the caravan park, driving and exploring those lush hills without guide or context.

The next year found me north again, at the farm this time, and the world tilted again. I learned so much there, and came home a different person. I made decisions right then, in those weeks, about the ways I wanted to live my life, and those decisions have held. The next year I was at the farm again. Afterwards I hitched a lift to Brisbane, and in the kitchen of near-strangers I decided I was going to quit my job, leave my house, and move to Europe.

I stayed at the showgrounds this year, camping out for the first time, and it was lovely. I volunteered, helped build the space, and couldn't believe it had taken me so long to get around to that experience of putting the party together.

This year I celebrated my 3rd dance-floor meeting anniversary with one of the loveliest human beings I have ever met, someone I am so glad to have in my life. 3 years ago, on that same dance floor, I met the person who would later pave my way overseas, who would let me sleep on her couch in London and nurse me through some rough European landings. One year ago I met the person whose house I am staying in as I type this- cruising past them on that dance floor, a mutual friend briefly introduced us, and we wound up in a 36-hour cuddling adventure that we still happily revisit when the mood strikes.

I spent this New Year wrapped up in the love of friends. Filled with the joy of our shared adventures, and the ones we strike out on alone. I beamed, watching my 3-year anniversary friend and my 1-year anniversary friend meet, and bond, and delight in each other. There were challenges at this year's party (that almost perfectly mirrored the challenges of the year: thanks universe, I get the message!) and at every challenging moment there was the love and support of a friend to carry me through. I have rarely felt as loved as I have over the past few weeks: my heart swells, thinking of it.

On the 2nd of January, fending off the let-down of it all being nearly over, one of those friends picked me up and we went off to a waterhole in the hills for a swim. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, this waterhole, broad waterfalls crashing down into a deep, wide swimming hole, bright butterflies and dragonflies skimming across the surface, scarcely anyone around. My body sings for swimming in beautiful places (in the past year I have swum in the ponds of Hampstead Heath, the harbour of Copenhagen, the Baltic Coast of Poland, the lakes of Berlin, the salty coastal waters of Sydney and the fresh waters of the Northern Rivers).

"Next year-" everyone says, and I join in the game, but I don't know where I will be next year. Here, at Tropical Fruits again, maybe. Or maybe somewhere else, taking with me every amazing thing I have learned through these amazing years of this party and what it has been in my life, and how it has shaped me.

Feasting Times

2009-12-26T15:53:00.002+11:00

Being a child of the southern hemisphere, this is the way I have made this season work for me:

The Solstice, the ending and beginning of the solar year, is on the 21st or 22nd (depending on the year, where you are, and whether you're counting the astronomical moment or the closest dawn or sunset). Solstice is important. It doesn't need additional spiritual or commercial elements to make it important: it just is. The length of days, the amount of light in the world, is what gives rhythm to life and growth. When that rhythm reaches its midsummer peak, we live festively, loudly, communally. We are outdoors a lot. Life is full of sunlight.

A thing that I like to do on or near the Solstice is this: to write down some things I have learned (a year is a good period of time for reflection), and then burn them, and let the ashes scatter in the sunlight. Then, maybe, write down some things I would like to keep in mind for the coming year, and put the list somewhere safe to revisit next year. This isn't a religious ritual. It's a personal ritual of reflection and letting go.

On the 25th of December there is a feast day. We eat lavishly, there are exchanges of gifts, we try to spend our time with the people we most love, or the people who make up our (born or chosen) families. This particular date is a religious and commercial festival, but it has been many different kinds of festivals for many different kinds of people, and it falls nicely in the midsummer season. Conveniently, most people have the day off, so they are available for feasting together. Houses decorated with sparkling lights and parcels wrapped in pretty papers are nice things, in the festival times.

The ending and beginning of the calendar year is the climax of this midsummer feasting time. We dress up gorgeously and celebrate wildly with fireworks and all-night dancing, to greet the dawn of the new year tired and rumpled and full of adventures.

Frills and bows and lovely horrors

2009-12-20T15:39:00.005+11:00

In the immense and varied library of kinks and fetishes that have popped up in my life, there is the gas mask. I love them (LOVE THEM) but don't play with them with other people so very often. I have done- they were a pretty frequent part of my repertoire when I was living in San Francisco. But not since then, really, and four years is a pretty long time for a favourite thing to not be pulled out for play.

I think I don't play with them with other people often because I find it hard to articulate what it is about them that I love. They don't immediately invite an action or suggest a mood or character. They are quite abstract. "I like gas masks" gives less direct information than "I like being spanked". And the way I enjoy them doesn't even have a direct correlation to activity. It's not "I love to wear gas masks and get fucked" or "I love to wear gas masks and then be tied up". I just love them.

I do play with them alone, but what does that even mean? I don't play with them as in set up elaborate auto-erotic scenarios featuring gas masks. I just wear them, and enjoy them, and try to figure out what it is about it I'm enjoying. It reminds me a bit of when I first got my pony boots, and I used to put them on when I was alone and just feel the changes in my body and my stance and how that shifted my thoughts and my headspace.

There are two divergent directions i feel myself go in when I am wearing a gas mask. One is the monstrous little girl- pink and ruffles and pigtails and Hello Kitty doll, but faceless and abject- absent- horrifying. The only human part of my face is my eyes, trapped behind huge glass disks. I love inhabiting this space. When I didn't have my gas mask with me I once went to a play party in ruffled socks, mary janes, cute polka dot underwear and a full-face executioner's mask. That particular space is such a powerful expression to me of what I do, what I am with my femmeness and my little-girlness. On display, and for looking at, and designed for touching and taking- but there is something very weird in there. Exercise caution. Teeth lurk where you may not expect them. That's always true, but blanking out and making weird my face makes it explicit. It makes me feel like a fucking fierce pervert, instead of 'just' the object of somebody else's perversion.

The other self that comes out in gas masks, sometimes, is this funny sweet playful beast. Four-legged and strange of face, like a tapir perhaps, or something more feline. I have had merry, merry hours stalking and lounging and pouncing between legs and seats and furniture. Or being locked into cages and batting at fingers or strings dangled through the bars. Very different beast-space to pony-space. Not very performative, not even especially fetishistic- the mask serves the purpose of dehumanizing enough to slip into that space, takes away mouth and voice quite conveniently, warps vision as though my eyes have become alien, concentrates the scents in the air as though I have a snake-like ability to taste them. I haven't gotten to spend very much time in that space, I think because it's hard to ask for (how to negotiate a scene like "actually can you just put the gas mask on me and react as though I am adorable when I start chasing your shoe laces?" Do-able, I guess, but it hasn't come up. From memory most times I've done it it's been negotiated as my reward for performing well during a submissive or masochist scene).

I am interested in how the gas mask changes my perception of the world from within it. How the world looks different through those glass disks, how the air tastes different, how breath becomes more measured. It acts as blinders on a horse, narrowing the field of vision and increasing the focus on what is directly ahead. It is a little like being underwater, or perhaps being a marine animal venturing onto the shore, an alien landing where the atmosphere has a strange density and toxic make-up. And being perceived as alien, and unlovely, hits some switch inside me that feels like freedom. Like being decorative on my own terms, and within my control.

It's also play for play's sake- play for shifting a perception of the world, and existing in it differently, rather than play for sexual or endorphin gratification. Sexual and endorphin gratification being fine things, of course. But I like other types of play, too.

Australia

2009-12-18T00:42:00.002+11:00

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

2009-12-04T21:14:00.002+11:00

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

2009-11-27T23:06:00.004+11:00

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:

2009-11-24T12:44:00.003+11:00

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

2009-11-20T15:37:00.004+11:00

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.

2009-11-19T14:07:00.002+11:00

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

2009-11-18T14:45:00.003+11:00

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?

Tahini: I was doing it wrong.

2009-11-15T05:58:00.003+11:00

I have never loved tahini. Of all the new & interesting foods that came into my life when I started hanging out with more vegetarians + food creatives, tahini was a bit of a let-down. I mean, I love many of the products of tahini- hommous, and salad dressings, and halva (actually I love halva to an extent that is probably indecent). I get that a jar of tahini is a Good Thing to have around. But the (many) people I've witnessed dripping plain tahini, straight from the jar, over toast and calling it breakfast?

Blech.

Tahini by itself is oily, bitter grossness in my mouth. I really, truly Did Not Get the love for it.

And then I moved to Berlin, and learned that we'd been doing it wrong, all along. Having learned the trick, I am now a total tahini devotee, gleefully joining in with the rampaging consumption that means that my kitchen needs to re-stock the mega-sized jars of tahini every week or less.

The trick? Is water. And not only does it make tahini delicious, turning oily, bitter grossness into something light, creamy, and delicious on toast, it is also incredibly awesome in a food-nerd-love way.

So you start out with a bowl with a bit of tahini in it. It is thin. It is oily. It is not appetising. Then you add a little dribble of water, and whisk it vigorously. Lo! The addition of water does not result, as you might expect, in watery tahini: no, the tahini thickens, often to a completely solid state (still not especially appealing, but exciting in a WTF! kind of way). Then, you add more water, little by little, and the curdled-looking lump of solid tahini thins out to something with the consistency of thick cream, much paler in colour than the original tahini you put in the bowl. The amount of water you add depends on whether you're going for a spreadable thing to eat on toast, or a liquidy thing to dribble on salad, but that's pretty much it. Tahini alone= GROSS. Tahini + water (+salt, pepper, lemon juice or whatever you want)= light, creamy deliciousness! And if you thin it out too much, and the tahini starts looking curdled & wierd again, you just add another spoonful of tahini and whisk again til you've got the consistency you're after.

And it's all due to the magic of emulsions.

I have been looking around the net for explanations of this emulsion process to satisfy the ravening geek within me, but haven't found anything particularly enlightening (you can read here about the use of tahini as an emulsifier in commercial food prep, or a brief explanation here of how to make your hommous creamy using emulsion magic). And beyond knowing that the emulsion- the balanced suspension of oil and water particles- works so well due to some emulsifying property of the sesame particles, I am pretty clueless about what's actually going on there. I'd love to know, for instance, why the emulsion magic works this way for tahini, but not for other high-oil-content nut butters I've tried it with (to date, adding water to almond butter or peanut butter just results in watery almond or peanut butter).

What I really want is an episode of Good Eats or similar, with Alton Brown going geeky with some diagrams about the interactions of oil, water and other particles (in tahini specifically- I'm pretty sure I've seen him explain emulsions re salad dressings & mayonnaises). Then I would be even happier whisking the morning bowl of tahini together, able to picture what the hell is going on in there to create something so very delicious.

Blood! Gore! Fabulous Accessories!

2009-11-13T03:22:00.004+11:00

In case it is not immediately obvious, this post is going to count as Way-TMI-Land to people who don't like hearing about periods. So, you know, read at own risk, etc.

Need something bright & colourful in your life? Then I strongly suggest you take a trip to etsy.com & search for "menstrual pads". Which is what I did this afternoon, and have had my mind blown by all the happy-fun-time-super-joy! coloured & patterned pads. Mushrooms! Polka-dots! Tasteful understated florals! Accessorisation options!

So, I am thinking: it feels like I've moved on enough from The Great Divacup Disaster Of '05, and even the Traumatic Gushing Experiences Of '07 & '08, to consider going eco-friendly with the bleeding again.

I bleed hellishly, and horribly, and frequently in ways that are absolutely incompatible with existing in public while retaining a publically acceptable denial that there is blood gushing forth from my body at an alarming rate. I have been blood-splatter humiliation girl, and oh-holy-shit-I-am-so-sorry-about-your-chair/sheets/carpet girl. I have sprinted down the side streets of Newtown with crimson gushing down my legs, thinking jesus fucking christ it's day 5 this is not fucking fair. And I have been all of these things in my 20's, rather than my teens when I could possibly have brushed it all of as just being clueless (although I was never clueless in my teens- I started bleeding age 10, by 13 I knew what was what, pretty thoroughly). It's just that things got so much dramatically worse around age 24 or so, it was like being caught out as a kid with a brand new bodily function and no idea how to manage it, all over again.

So since the crimson tide became a regular crimson fucking tsunami in my life, I've been a bit busy just trying to figure out how to manage that, and I gave up on the whole eco-friendly bleeding products thing. The Divacup didn't work for me, and I didn't have the time/patience/initial outlay to figure out another solution that also might not work, so back to the hideous, plastic world of disposable things it was. And not just any old disposable things, cos I am beyond the capacities of modern tampon technology. No, it was a sad return to the hideous world of attachable pads. Which are fucking gross, and insanely wasteful, and have glue on them which stick to my pubic hair, and AS IF you need extra eye-watering painful moments in the middle of an eyewateringly painful period!

But, a couple of years later, I feel like I've kind of got it under control. A little bit, at least. I am no longer surprised by the amount I bleed. I have some faint confidence in being able to handle it. And I fucking hate wearing toxic, plastic, irritating imminent-landfill in my knickers. And I have been spending a hell of a lot more of my time with hippies, which means that rad-pads/lunapads/moonrags/whatever are as much a part of the obligatory "Gah I'm Bleeding Offer Me Sympathy" round-tables that happen in all dyke sharehouses (well. All the ones I've ever lived in) as your usual, commercial, disposable options.

So, the obvious conclusion, I would like to invest in a set of cloth pads, and see how they are. And since they are such a fantastic cottage-industry dealio, they are available in about 10,000 variations of shape, layering, construction, size- and of course, fabric. I want one with rockets, and one with tentacles, and quite possibly one on which I will embroider bloody, melodramatic lines from poetry:

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"

Unfortunately I probably won't be able to buy any til I get back to Australia, unless I find a local Berlin craftster making them, because I can't get parcels mailed to my Berlin address. But if anyone Aus-side knows of good non-online suppliers, let me know.

(this lovely illustration comes from Mari-Chan, and features on at least one stylin' lady I know's tampon case)

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Addendum, some time later: I am finding it strange to exist at once in the laissez-fair, anti-shame world of the hippy menstruation crew, which tends towards a particular relaxedness about human blood- natural process, hang onto the pads and chuck them in the wash later, never mind the occasional blood-stains on the sheets, etc- and also in the "I cut people up and put needles in their skin for fun" crew, which is absolutely, obsessively, compulsively strict about the containment & curtailment of blood, once released. The happy-hippy-no-shame part of my brain is all "oh cool, you can get cute 'wet bags' to chuck blood-soaked pads into between washes", and the well-trained blood pervert side of my brain is going "OH MY GOD HOW CAN YOU BE SO RELAXED ABOUT A CUTE ZIP-UP BAG FULL OF HUMAN BLOOD?". I have experienced similar cognitive dissonance in relationships, sometimes: there is When I Am Cutting You Up, which is all latex gloves + sealed containers for anything that becomes bloodied, and then there is when we are on our periods, which is all being mightily relaxed about blood on the sheets & sometimes each other. Hmm.

Introductory German, housemate-style

2009-11-04T08:27:00.003+11:00

Using German, and being understood, is one of my greatest (small, beautiful, every-day-life) joys. Week by week the length of the interactions I can have all in German increases (from mere seconds to almost entire minutes at a time!). Not fast enough to satisfy me, and I am burning up to start proper German classes, but the glow of successfully making a purchase, or asking directions, or responding to pleasantries, without needing to switch to English- ah, it's so lovely. If I manage to avoid English for a whole conversation I often get asked if I'm from the Netherlands- apparently, that's what my accent sounds like in German.

I am not in school, and I don't watch the television, so the German I learn comes from: housemates, street signs, overheard conversations, and the Turkish Markets (zwei stuck bitte! Ja, alles!).

Some nights I sit in the kitchen and pester my lovely housemates for more words, more sentences, stringing them together clumsily then practising til I get them right. This being a gigantic political housing project in Berlin, it stands to reason that the sentences I learn are 99% beer & cigarettes. I find these phrases scrawled on ripped-off pieces of paper, tucked into my notebooks and pockets.

I just found the post-it notes with my first housemate-German lesson:
"Kann ich mir von dir eine cigarette drehen?"- Can I roll a cigarette from yours?
"Kanst du mir eine cigarette drehen?"- Can you roll me a cigarette?
"Kann ich hier rauche?"- Can I smoke here? Or the more formal: "Ist es OK fur dich wenn ich hier rauche?"- Is it OK for you if I smoke here?
"Alter, mein tabak!"- Gimme my tobacco back!
And the first phrase of German I learned, on landing here back in 2005: "Hast du feuer?"- the social glue of Berlin, I think, is that simple little phrase.

Tonight we covered:
"Mochtest du bier?"- Would you like beer?
"Mochtest du noch bier?"- Would you like more beer?
"Ich mochte ein bier kaufen"- I'd like to buy a beer
Which morphed into...
"Ich mochte gerne bier kaufen, bitte!" (there was some bickering between housemates about whether one was more correct than the other)
and then a lesson on:
"Ich wurde gerne (something) kaufen"- Ich wurde gerne guthaben kaufen! Ich wurde gerne tomaten kaufen! I want to buy something!

Then we got into wanting things (my spelling goes a bit wobbly here, cos we were well into the bier by now):
"Ich mochte schlafen bitte!"- I'd like to sleep please!
"Ich mochte bitte jetzt schlafen!"- I'd like to sleep now please!
There's some scrawls under that about "schaffen"- to work, build, create, "schaff"- sheep, "scharf"- sharp, "schlaff"- hanging, tired, saggy, which leads directly to:
"Ich fuhle mich schlaff"- I feel saggy! As in, god, I feel wrecked.

And then scharf comes out to play, cos when we really really really want something, we're totally sharp on it:
"Ich bin scharf darauf tanzen zu gehen!"- dude, I am so keen for a dance, you have no idea.
"Ich bin scharf darauf meine haare zu bleichen!" Hell yes my hair needs bleaching!
"Ich bin scharf darauf schwimmen zu gehen!" But it's -2C out, so maybe swimming isn't SUCH a good idea.

For anyone tempted to try to learn German from these transcribed notes, please be aware that there are several dozen crimes against umlauts in the above as I haven't figured out where the umlaut key on my netbook is hiding.

A Bird Released

2009-10-27T00:47:00.006+11:00

So life gets cold; it's what happens in Europe when the summer ends and the autumn rolls in. I knew this in theory but to experience it in practice has been enlightening. Within a month of the start of autumn the temperature had fallen from the equivalent of the warmest Sydney summer day, to the coldest Sydney winter night. A shift that takes 6 months in Sydney takes place in weeks here, and then it gets colder, then colder still. It's the pace of the change that is startling, how much more climatic variation is packed into the months than I'm used to.

I spent the first few weeks of the coldest weather freezing, and grumbling, until I eventually sorted myself out. There is strategy and technology for dealing with the cold, stuff I've never had to learn. Stuff about layers, and materials, and adaptability. The entire city starts dressing alike, and it becomes impossible to distinguish individuals at outdoor events, because we are all wearing exactly the same thing: thick trousers, heavy boots, a torso-distorting puffy vest, black coat, flip-top gloves, wool hat, scarf wrapped up and over your face. Gender is impossible to distinguish, body language is muffled: glasses, height and taste in hats become our only identifying features. I become exceedingly popular when I make a hat with detachable, button-on beard, because it serves the twin purposes of keeping my face warm and identifying me in the shapeless crowd.

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After all this time, I write again just to tell you about the weather?

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I was supposed to leave Berlin for Barcelona at 6 o'clock this morning, but I didn't.

---

I have been somewhere strange (compared to what?). Long, quiet months watching this beautiful city shift through late summer, autumn, early stages of freezing. Putting off decisions, putting off life. Traveling not as an exuberant hurling outwards of self, no: traveling as a muted, reflective space. I could say 'disconnected', but that would be a lie: there have been connections, strong and beautiful, finding their way to me through miles of cotton-wool vagueness. But mostly there has been me, my own company, sifting and shifting and observing, and sometimes nothing so active- just existing. Me, this city, my bike. Canals and swans and trees changing color up and down the banks. Cobblestones growing slick and slimy beneath growing layers of fallen leaves.

To emerge from that space is a recent surprise. Oh! I think. This is who I am with my volume turned back up again. Here is me with pom-poms in my hands, chants on my lips, swelling with pride at a fearsome squad of queer cheerleaders I somehow helped to create. Here is me on this dancefloor, that grin I forgot I had, these silvershiny stomping boots, a flick of hair and I'd love to buy you a drink. Here is me manning this squat bar in this broken concrete lot, newly occupied space, us in here, the cops out on the street, knowing something about this culture and these people, the ways they (we) live, the things they (we) do. Here is me living, full of life, engaged again. Thank fuck whispers the part of me that has been in some shaky kind of shock since the days before I left Australia.

I find myself beaming at the beauty I am surrounded by. An afternoon spent getting to know a girl and a truck, a city-centre wagonplace with flocks of geese bustling busy through yellow leaves, a tiny perfect hedgehog (igle) in a pile of rusted bike frames.

So. I decide not to leave, not to go so far so soon. I make the equally terrifying decision to stay, for a little while. I have a job, somehow, or at least a little bit of work, and every day of work is another adventure I can afford to have. I want to go places nearer to here (Prague next week, maybe, according to a bubbling and excited conversation in a wood-heated wagon tonight). I want to revel a little bit in this somehow-surprising place I find myself in: Europe, and happy, and alive, and thrilled with it.

Pretty Much Totally Unrelated To Traveling.

2009-10-06T23:26:00.006+11:00

Please to enjoy unrelated photo of this pig I embroidered on a hanky.I've been getting a little excited, much to my surprise, about recipes for home-made vegan cheeses. I think I'm missing my vegan homies in Sydney, who always ALWAYS made it worth my while to go to the extra effort of cooking vegan (especially if what was being cooked was delicious vegan baked goods). I am enjoying a brief fantasy of returning triumphantly home at some point to prepare a vegan pizza with vegan mozzarella cheese on top THAT MELTS. I haven't attempted any of these vegan cheese recipes yet, but I'm gonna, in the next few days. I need a challenge (cracks knuckles). A culinary challenge.

I was casting my mind back today, trying to pinpoint when I went vegetarian. I remember being in the US in 2005, and eating meat there (and oh boy, I suspect that the American relationship to meat was the beginning of the end of my relationship to meat). I think I can remember the moment, actually: not so long after I came home from the US, I flew to Perth to visit a friend. We got dinner at a dining hall in a nightclub district. I got some kind of duck soup (I used to really like duck). It was fucking revolting. I thought I am done with eating animals. And I'm pretty sure that was it. The moment I went from gently disparaging vegetarians at every turn, to being a vegetarian.

But I'm kind of one of THOSE vegetarians. I wear leather. I eat eggs (although, less and less often). I use composted animal shit in my vegetable garden. I eat cheeses made with calf rennet, sometimes. Once, I went fishing with my ex-girlfriend, and we caught some yabbies, and I ate some (which appealed much more strongly to my sustainable-living, know-where-your-food-comes-from ethic than driving 40km to buy a packet of soy sausages made with ingredients sourced from fuckknowswhere). I'm less of a all meat is always totally disgusting vegetarian and more of hey, I don't need to eat meat to live, so as a general rule I won't! vegetarian.

The puritanism and (self-and-other-) judgment of striving for ethical dietary perfection annoys me (and "bad" food vs "good" food sounds sometimes an awful lot too much likethe normalised body-hatred of a woman chastising herself for eating a chocolate bar). It irritates some portion of my brain that wants to point out the ridiculousness of logical extremes (I use milk on my tomato plants to combat fungal disease without recourse to heavy-metal-based fungicides: does that make my tomatoes non-vegan-friendly? What about those tomatoes at the supermarket, shipped from fuckknowswhere and grown with petrochemical fertilisers?). But the other side of that annoys me too: I do not agree with all the tenets of veganism, so I cast it all aside as ridiculous. Or, I occasionally like to eat bacon, so I see no point in trying to limit my meat consumption.

Vegatarianism has meant, for me, eating and cooking way more interesting food than a meat-based diet. Veganism is a food nerd's DREAM, full of fascinating and delightful substitutions and food processes (making brownies by first making a white sauce! No, really! It's amazing! SO much more intriguing procedurally than just blending some flour, sugar, cocoa, butter & eggs). And, vegan cheese! Made from nuts & tofu! Allegedly, types of vegan cheese that melt. Learning to make dairy cheese was food-nerd heaven, too. I am happily looking forward to occupying the entire spectrum of cheese-making nerdery.

Love from Kreuzberg

2009-09-15T11:27:00.005+10:00

I wish I could show you photos of the most beautiful moments of Berlin, but I can't, because they're all from a bicycle- and I've gotten a hell of a lot better at riding, but not quite good enough to take photos while I'm doing it.

There's the long ride down the curving paths through the towering trees on the way to the kleingarten, slow and meandering. The ride back in the warm light of a peachy sunset, on the road with trucks rumbling in my ear- my friend riding a bikelength ahead of me, glazed in sweat and grit, the retrofutures of the television tower at Alexanderplatz looming over her shoulder. There's the breath stolen every time I cross the bridge at Warschauer Strasse, watching the lights flicker over the canal stretching to either side, the massive graffiti murals stretching along the banks. And all the late-night foolishness, hands freezing, blood warm, riding in packs of revellers from bar to bar, crossing the city for 5am pizza, 6am more beer, home on the dawn light.

I am cautious of how much I love this place, of how heavily I've fallen (knew I'd fall) for gritty streets and filthy queers and the fucking profound beauty of every part of it. But I have no caution on my bike, have no need to protect myself from that particular fierce joy, the true love of wind in hair and pedals going and me, and the city, and the machine, and the roads.

I love that every night I go out on my bike will be a good night, even if the venue sucks, the music's shit, the crowd has a bad attitude and the beer is warm. The sheer pleasure of riding there and riding home will make it worthwhile, leaves me free to shrug and leave whenever I want to (and ride to another bar, on the other side of town if I like, for the company of silence and wheels turning).

---

The first month I spent here was almost pure, uninterrupted sunshine: glorious, magical. I was glad I'd first fallen for this city in late October, when Autumn gray and freezing rain ruled the streets, lest my love become some silly fleeting Summer thing. On those Summer nights I slept naked with my window open, high enough in my old hospital room that nobody below could see me. I woke one morning, just a couple of weeks ago, with Autumn tickling across my skin- the sharpest, fastest season change I have ever felt. It wasn't the end of the warmth, but it was the beginning of the end, and I have watched Autumn settling in with fascination. We don't have seasons like this in Sydney (and San Francisco seasons are a beast unto themselves). I am hypnotised, delighted by the slide of temperatures and the greying of days. I want to be here when the city unfurls again, defrosts into Spring. I want to live here and watch the seasons change all the time.

---

It's a funny thing, me, Berlin, this time. I'm having a lovely time (but I'm sad). I'm sad (but I'm having a lovely time). It's so beautiful, and I am so happy to be here, and there is nowhere else I'd rather be. But I am sad, necessarily sad, and peaceful with it. This sadness is a learning thing, and this beautiful city is fitting itself in between the serious business of sitting in windowsills with cups of tea and good friends (new or old) and talking, about things, and working things out.

Once upon a time I declared, louder and prouder every year: life gets better with every year. That belief has been seriously shaken, a number of times in the past few years. I have fallen, and landed hard, and been furious to discover that gains I'd made had been lost again, and that sometimes it was harder to get back to the point I'd started at, the second time around. Life, and people, will do that to you, I have discovered (and raged against). But a lot of tea and a lot of windowsills later, and I think of a lovely mermaid on a lovely mermaid's wall that says: Knowe Thyself. And it's worth it, and it's not easy, but it does get better. Maybe even better than before.

--

I have to show you this picture, too. Germans are SERIOUS about their veggie gardening.

Worked out

2009-08-25T06:45:00.002+10:00

I am sticky-salty-sweaty from a kickboxing class: a room full of well-muscled women in comfortable clothes, a blur of trying to follow along and catch up to the German instructions, the pound of gloved fists on gloved fists. Worked and worked and worked out until my arms were too weak to hold the gloves up to my face any more, until we poured sweat freely from our bodies, wore glossy grins and endorphin-glazed eyes.

Such a different sport to karate. SUCH a different sport. I can't even put them in the same place in my head, the serenity and discipline and focus of karate against the frenetic whirl of kickboxing. Different sports, different highs. It felt so good to make my body move like that again, and I love the high of the pushburnHARDERFASTERmoremoremore work out, but I missed the precision and ritual of the dojo.

It felt so good to make my body move like that again. It feels so good to sit, now, sticky and achey and enjoying the drift of my body's biochemical response to exertion through my muscles and my mind. Exercise, like eating and fucking and brushing your teeth, is a normaliser: a stabiliser. It is something that brings you to yourself, to a place like home, no matter where you are or how you are. And I am in Berlin, far from home, with no plans, and I am OK (but not great): and my body feels so good right now, like mine, like an achievement, like home.

--

I have been thinking so much about an aborted, disrupted reality that I jointly created and occupied for a few intense months before I left Sydney. I have been thinking about how much I wanted it, how deeply I believed in it. I have been thinking about the bubble bursting, the reality dissolving, about the trauma of that moment, that breaking experience, and the trauma of how the truths revealed in that breaking moment reflect on the entire reality of what existed.

I have been thinking about how all of it has left me with an intense distrust of myself and my desires. I have articulated that thought, but can think of no way past it, no possible solutions, no platitudes of progress. For now I just sit with the knowledge, and some memories, in a city far away, and wait for something like perspective.

The city that everybody loves

2009-08-19T10:03:00.002+10:00

It's a hard city because it's an easy city. Everyone comes to Berlin, and everyone loves it. The rent is cheap, the beer is cheap, and the best party you've ever been to in your life is happening every night in 20 different places around town. There's an amazing squat with an amazing history on every block, a voku on every night, a queer performance art convergence every weekend. There's a fucking radical language school to go study at, if you want to learn German as well.

It's easy to have a really good time here, but really fucking hard to get a local to smile at you. Because they're sick of it. Sick of the tourists, sick of the travelers, sick of living in the world's coolest city.

Warmth comes hard, and slowly here.

So here I am, a traveler once again trying to settle myself in a place that has hardened itself against travelers. Where I could while away every night of the week having the best time ever (in the company mostly of other travelers), but where, perversely, I don't want to. I have fixated on this idea of a life, of space, of markets and cooking and learning German and going to political meetings, of forcing open a niche for myself in the rockface of this over-traveled city.

I have a room, a sublet for 2 months, and it is the most beautiful space. I sit on wide, solid window ledges and smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, watch the sunlight and the wind in the trees. The room is in an old squatted hospital grounds, legalised now but beautiful and rambling and chaotic still, with heavy doors and institutional concrete staircases. The doors have brackets bolted into them for barricading, and I have been shown the heavy wooden beams for barricading and the airhorns (in case of Nazis or police) and given a pocket-sized can of pepperspray (in case of the creepy local guys who like to hang out around the doors downstairs, knowing that mostly women live here). This is normal, yes: this is life.

I have a bike, and I am brave enough to ride on the road- even the chaotic, busy roads around central Kreuzberg. I can ride for miles and miles in this flat, easy city, and barely feel it in my legs. Today I rode to the language school, then through a park where (inexplicably) chickens and goats and donkeys grazed, then past the canal where I sat 5 years ago on my first visit and fed the swans, then to the Turkish market, and then home (vegetable-laden).

I don't feel like a visitor here, caught up in the whirl of vacation: sights, museums, galleries, party nights. I feel like I am living, creating a life, carving a space, finding a rhythm. And I find that I want to, even against the hardness of it, even against the dismissive people and blank stares. I want to live here. I want to seek out the pockets of warmth (like my new housemate, inviting me along to her kickboxing class tomorrow), I want to prove myself to the doubting faces who expect me to vanish on the Autumn like every other well-meaning, wide-eyed traveler, I want to learn the language and watch that slow nod of respect that I gain from the locals whenever I am able to avoid reverting to English.

I don't know if my plan all along was to stop in Berlin, to get caught here, but I suspect that the idea has lingered in my mind ever since I first visited. This place fits me, somehow, or I feel like it fits me (maybe everyone who comes here feels the same way), even in it's hardness, even in it's wariness. I think that I am a person, a life, in search of a purpose. And in the absence of a purpose, there's always Berlin.

Northwards

2009-08-03T21:15:00.005+10:00

I'm in Europe, and it's amazing. I have no sense of having arrived anywhere yet, I am a body in motion and a mind with no real forward plan beyond the cash left in my bank account and the next stop on the itinerary. Someone asked me what I did for a living the other day and I stared at them blankly. I do not currently earn a living. I have a finite quantity of cash to my name, an awareness that it will run out sooner rather than later, and a determination that I will give the idea of making more money some thought, some time, soon- but not yet.

I have been, all in a rush UK-Denmark-Stockholm-Poland. I am sitting on a couch in a holiday apartment in Poland, checking myself out of the adventures for today. My throat is sore and my glands are swollen and I haven't had a day of stillness, of inactivity, since I arrived on this continent. I am hoping that by staying inside and ignoring the temptations of the glorious Polish sunshine outside I will somehow defeat this viral threat and be back in top form tomorrow for the important business of gawping at ancient, giant castles and smooth-worn cobblestone streets.

Travelogues make no sense, not really. See this beautifully lit ferry churning across the Baltic, carrying me and many others to Poland. See this ladybird on my fingers, a blow-in from the port at Nymashimn in Sweden. I have dozens of photos bred of boredom in Stockholm and almost none of the breathtakingly beautiful (and breathtakingly touristy) old city of Gdansk.

Poland more than anywhere else I've ever been blows me away with the casual complexities of culture, ownership, belonging, defeat, resistance, reconstruction. This church at this site built in 1100, rebuilt on the same site in 1230, rebuilt on the same site by a different religion in 1500, blown to pieces in WWII, rebuilt in 1992 from pieces hidden in the countryside by the locals. The Old City so-called because it's been here since 992, the New City because it's only been around since 1150 or so. This country has been variously the largest in Europe and nonexistent within the space of a few centuries, a few alliances, a few casual carvings-up by the neighbouring powers.

It is pleasant, to be wide-eyed and absorbing this information, contextualising the slivers of knowledge I've been fed by my remote, antipodean outpost of Western European culture. To see and feel and touch the environments that are the basis for the myths and fairytales of identity of white people who left, and took up lives elsewhere that still reference these things constantly. To recognise the forests where a woodsman might live, meadows where a shepherd might guard a flock, castles where orders of knights divided up the territory around them. To stand with my feet in the grubby, weedy waters of the Baltic, to glow in that slant of golden mid-summer evening light, that I had always assumed was a cinematographers fantasy but turns out to be real.

Flight- Departure

2009-07-15T19:16:00.002+10:00

3 HOURS IN

The light outside the plane is peach and brown, with the thick orange band of a chased sunset between the rippling red land and the pale blue sky. We are heading north-east, directly across the continent and then off the edge and up- past Indonesia, past East Timor, past disputed seas and straits, to Singapore. To Singapore in name and geographic utility only, of course. A pause in an ever-so-slightly Singapore-flavoured lounge in the nationless, locationless zone of Transit, En-Route To Somewhere Else. Then onto the vessel again for the second leg, a grinding, gruelling, universally loathed 13 hour stretch, to be belched out into the alien chaos of Heathrow, stripped raw and mindless from our confinement.

We are only a few hours in, now, still closer to home than to anywhere else. It will be dark soon- already the brown and red of the land has turned ash-grey, the clouds gilded pink, the sky deepening above that western sunset. I wonder whose night I will be experiencing, and which morning I will wake up in (this morning, Monday morning in Sydney, I realised that by Tuesday morning I would be at my friend's flat in London, except that it would be a Tuesday morning taking place 36 hours later. Someone else's morning entirely).

The plane shakes and shudders with the rough air over the centre of a hot, dry continent. We pause, buckle our seatbelts, and continue on with our movies or books or tapping away at our laptops. We are alive, still, fresh onto this adventure, not yet stinking and crumpled and too tired even for the blind sedation of the in-flight movies. Babies cry with vigour still, rather than the listless desperation of 20 more hours of this, and adults tolerate it without the grim endurance of that wail in what our bodies will insist is, somewhere-or-other, the middle of the night.

18 HOURS IN

It is no time in particular, in this aircraft, at this moment. We are chasing the dawn across Eastern Europe. The light outside is a thick, foggy blue, neither dark or light, no stars visible. The animated map in front of me shows our plane, cartoon-form, straddling the divide of light and dark that describes day and night across the globe. We are north of Istanbul, heading west over the Black Sea, flying high over places with names like Burgas and Varna and Brasov.

It Is midday in the place I have come from, and my body insists that there will be no more sleep. It is 2am in the place we are headed. We will disgorge with the dawn we have been chasing, at 6am, in no state but with no option to take on the full day ahead of us. To succumb to sleep before the local night falls would be to allow victory to jetlag.

We are 12 kilometres up the sky, a number that steals my breath away. The clouds are loosely strewn far below us.

I can see small, scattered cities now, set in dark green patchwork, streetlights still lit. They will be waking to a beautiful morning soon.

There was more to this, cut out for concerns of connectedness, privacy, caution at exposing too much. I have never found a comfortable line to walk between telling the truth, recording the things I know I will want to read back on, and respecting other people's privacy. I will remind myself, when I read this later, that the full version lives on my hard drive somewhere, and tells the truth.

Fertilising 101

2009-07-10T12:17:00.004+10:00

Part one of what may be, in the unlikely event that I have time, a series on Sharehouse Herb & Veggie Garden Basics.

I am handing over 'my' garden (more correctly, the garden that I planted) into the care of the people who will still be living here with it and hopefully enjoying it. In the interests of a properly documented hand-over, I am making some notes about how to look after it. I am not an expert, by any means, but then, with gardening, few people are. All you can do is read around, wonder at all the contradicting advice, attempt to translate the more arcane terminology, throw your hands up in disgust at it all and just settle on a method that works for you.

So: The Basics Of Fertilisers.

Fertilisers should generally be applied after rain or watering. If you're building a new veggie garden or planting new crops, you will add some food then as well into the soil in the form of a good layer of compost, plus other stuff (Google the plant you're growing for info on what to feed it at planting time). Once it's growing, the fertilisers for herb & veggie gardens come in three rough categories: nitrogen-heavy, potassium-heavy & general feeders & tonics. There is lots of stuff you can read up on that will tell you to use XX-YY-ZZ fertilisers for particular purposes, but I have never been able to adequately decipher it. What I have puzzled out is:

Nitrogen Is For Leaves
Nitrogen-heavy fertilisers are for feeding lush, green growth, where you want lots of leaves to grow really quickly & not accumulate too much flavour. Lettuce, kale, silverbeet, rocket, broccoli, Asian greens, mustards and so on: when the point of the plant is the leaves, and you want lots of lush, fast growth of them. The fertiliser I use for this is Charlie Carp, which is made of ground-up corpses of pest carp in Australian rivers. I start feeding as soon as the 'true leaves' have appeared on the seedlings, and continue to feed twice a week for as long as the plants are growing (until they 'bolt', or send out a flower stalk, which is pretty much over-red-rover for leafy plants- unless you're talking about broccoli in which case the flower stalk is the bit that you eat). I mix a generous lidful of Charlie Carp & along with a lidful of Seasol or cupful of worm-juice (they are both general feeders, see below) into a big watering can & fill the rest up with water.

NOTE ON HERBS: Even though you eat them for their leaves, not all herbs like lots of nitrogen fertilisers! Actually, 'dry' herbs like sage, thyme & rosemary don't want any at all- they grow slowly, without much food, which causes their leaves to be more strongly flavoured. These guys should get only an occasional (every 2 weeks in spring/summer) inclusion on a 'general feeding' round. Basil, on the other hand, likes nitrogen fertilisers & should be fed whenever you're feeding the leafy greens.

Potassium Is For Flowers
If the plant you're growing produces fruits for you to eat, then it needs to flower. To encourage flowering, you feed potassium, usually in the form of 'sulphate of potash' (you can get it from Mitre 10 or K-Mart). This is eggplants, capsicums, chillies & tomatoes primarily- also strawberries (lots of other vegetables flower to produce fruit, but for instance beans are pretty self-sufficient & don't seem to like lots of fertilising, they will flower without it, and things like zucchinis & cucumbers like 'general' foods, they do not seem to be fussed on potassium). So OK you want to feed your eggplants, tomatoes, chillies & strawberries plenty of potassium, which I do by mixing a teaspoonful of sulphate of potash into a watering can with a some general feeder like Seasol or worm wee, and also a SMALL amount of nitrogen fertiliser- maybe half a cap (yes, these plants need nitrogen as well, just not too much of it or you'll get loads of lush leaves on plants that refuse to flower). They get the potassium feed once a week in spring/summer, and a general feed once a week.

General Foods Are For Everyone!
There are lots of good 'general' foods, which are not too high or heavy in any of the nutrients but provide a good spectrum of minerals & things. It's probably a good idea to use a range of different things for this purpose so your plants get a varied diet. My mainstays are Seasol & worm wee but people make nice weed teas for this purpose too. So into a watering can I'd dump about a cup of worm wee & a lidful of Seasol, then fill it up with water, and feed EVERYONE with this- herbs, leafy veggies, beans, zucchinis, radishes, tomatoes, fruit trees, potted plants, potatoes- everyone gets a bit of this. Although, some more frequently than others: veggies that grow really quickly for one summer need more food than slow-growing herbs, so for instance most of the veggies get fed twice a week while the herbs get fed about once a fortnight.

Compost of course is the primary #1 general feeder, a balanced diet that pretty much all your plants will like. Compost out of the compost bin or the worm farm is an excellent thing to chuck in when you're building your beds or planting up your pots, and you can also side-dress once the plants are in by scraping the mulch back and putting scoops of compost around them.

One week

2009-07-06T12:34:00.002+10:00

Sitting on the back step of the Nunnery a few days ago (I moved back there, did I mention? I craved warmth & comfort before I left, and the other house was far-away & lonely) I experienced my first real fluttering surge of excitement to be leaving- to be heading off on some kind of adventure. I shared my excitement with the cat, twined around my feet, with the cigarette in my hand, with the stars.

Mostly when people ask me if I'm excited they get a sideways twisted smile, a shrug, a "yeah, I suppose- but-". But. But I am caught up in something gleaming and precious here, something that is a rare treat in my life, something that I lean into with the thrill of sunshine on cold leaves after a long, dark winter. To be leaving it, to know that it may not be here when I return, feels ridiculous. Feels like spitting in the eye of a moment of magic. Feels like saying, oh well, there will be others, and they will suffice, as though there is nothing ever really unique about a human connection. But to stay just for this, to turn my back on my plans and my self for a moment of magic, is even more ridiculous. It's the wrong energy to bring to something, the wrong material to build something out of. So I'm going, of course I'm going, and I don't know what will happen next.

"Probably", I tell people, "I'll be home by summer". But the point is, I don't know if I will be, and if I am, I don't know if she'll be here for me.

And even that easy-told story, of excitement dimmed in favour of experiencing this moment here, is obscured by other things, by the fact that winding up this period of my life is fucking with head in ways that have nothing to do with human connection. The three and a half years since I came home from America have been my first stint of trying on this grown-up skin, of being a Worker rather than a Student. And bringing that period to a close I can't help but measure my performance, and find myself sorely lacking. I have not succeeded, as a Grown-Up Worker. It is a skin that doesn't fit me well, and I wear it badly.

I am in the process of training my replacement at the job I have held for three years, and training him feels like going over, with a fine-tooth comb, every level of failure, of friction, of disappointment, of being blocked, of being cut down, of the deep, sick feeling of knowing I'm not doing my job well and having no idea what to do about that.

It is a lost feeling, to face and acknowledge these things, because they leave me thinking: so, what next? What other options, what other ways to live? How can I be in the world? Who am I, and what do I do, and what do I want?

Leaving is partly about holding those questions in me, and hitting 'pause' for a moment on the need to do anything with them. Holding them, being aware of them, and having many different experiences that may or may not inform the answers. Leaving is about ending it, this way of living(working) that has been sitting so badly with me, and hoping that somewhere out there I will find a better way to be.

There's no aphrodesiac like a one-way ticket out of the country.

2009-06-11T16:58:00.006+10:00

Suddenly I am like a tantrum-throwing infant, squalling & stomping my feet: I DON'T WANT TO GO TO EUROPE! Europe stinks! Who needs Europe? Whose stupid idea was this whole adventure anyway? Suddenly "I'll be gone indefinitely" has become "Well- I don't know- maybe- um. Maybe I'll come back for the summer".

I would like to sincerely apologize to the non-trivial number of people I have mocked, or been cynical to, when they have embarked on logically foolish but emotionally compelling endeavours where one or other of the participants is about to get on a plane and leave the country. I was right in what I said, yes, but knowing that has apparently not prevented me from doing exactly the same thing.

That noise is the karma stick cracking me across the back of the head. Ouch.

I am so deeply in denial about my imminent departure that I am actually afraid, in my rare moments of clarity, that I will forget to do something rather necessary like apply for my visa, or pack my suitcase, or arrange my places to stay. I have made delaying those things, putting them off, refusing to think about it, into an art-form. Procrastination: Ask Me How.

Meanwhile I am having a very good time, in denial. This past weekend was Bad Dog's Playgroup party and Extra Dirty, and both of those parties blew my mind. I am having fun in ways that I forgot it was possible to have fun. Cynical hard-edged mutinously independent Ali seems to have stepped off the stage for a moment, and wide-eyed grinning hand-clapping delighted "oh my goodness this is so much FUN!" Ali is in the house.

Given that it was hard-edged cynical Ali who decided she might as well hurl herself out into the world, over the seas, because nothing that interesting was happening in her life here (the problem with purchasing international flights: you have MONTHS before departure for something happen to make you regret the decision), I'm not really sure which one is going to be getting on that plane in July. July. That's ages away, right?

Making Something

2009-06-01T22:49:00.003+10:00

Every Monday night we gather in a sweet little community run space in Enmore, and we craft together. We are not the first stitch'n'bitch group in the world, not even the first in this space, but who needs to be the only people doing something fabulous in order for it to be fabulous? We are building something, making something, a little community of skill and warmth and love. One week we crochet hats, the next we spend making stuffed animals out of socks and gloves, the one after we cross-stitch. And some weeks, like this week, we all work on our own projects, with a million conversations threading through across and around the room, over pots of tea and bags of yarn.

Some of us are expert crafters, some of us have never picked up a needle or hook before, some are expert in one thing and brand new to another. Many of us are brand-newly experiencing the magic, the revelation of craft, the way the world tilts and shifts when you learn that I can make that, and you witness yourself doing it.

This group is a project I thought and spoke about for a long time before I began it. I am so proud of having done so. Seeing people blossom into the confidence of new crafts, seeing the connections and friendships forming, the crafters coming out of the woodwork to be social and share with each other: it's a lovely thing we have made together, and I am proud to have begun it.

(photo by Miss Yasmin, taken at last week's cross-stitch extravaganza)

Waves

2009-05-24T13:22:00.004+10:00

We are 4 women and this fierce & surging ocean, the waves so intense that the distortion, looking all the way out to the horizon, is enough to induce sea-sickness. It looks like the end of the world, Armageddon as it always turns up in my nightmares (a fierce, uncontrollable ocean, implacably advancing, unrelenting). The air is thick with salt-spray and the breakers are violent, crazed things. This pool is usually calm, clear blue: but today it is white-water surging & hissing, driftwood and debris crashing against the rocks.

And so, of course, we get in. Strip naked on this freezing-cold, biting-wind day, dash down the stairs, and leap into the fierce water. It's warm- warmer than the air- and we shriek with being shoved & pushed & pulled by the waves breaking over the pool wall. It's brilliant, thrilling, enlivening, washing the hang-over cobwebs out of our brains, and it's a little bit terrifying as well: because those waves are really fucking rough, actually, and actually, those rocks behind us are really hard, and there is a moment where you are trying to stay where you are but the wave is shoving you hard at the rocks and you realise this may not be the best idea you've ever had.

But we all survive (with only minor injuries- my foot got smacked & scraped along a rock, and someone else wound up with sea-urchin spines embedded in her foot). We scramble out and, teeth-chattering, dress again, bubbling and thrilled with our adventure. There is impromptu pocket-knife and safety-pin surgery to remove sea-urchin spikes, there is a swig from a hip-flask of something sweet & strong, and we disperse. Salty and happy and alive, very alive.

Formative: created by

2009-05-22T02:23:00.007+10:00

So I wrote this, and left it up overnight, and woke up in the morning and deleted it. But deleting it didn't feel right. I wasn't comfortable with the reasons why I deleted it: it felt like shame, and silence, and not talking about "these things" in polite company. And you know what? FUCK SHAME & FUCK SILENCE.

It's my right to talk about this, and I choose to. For myself, and for all the many (many, many people- this is a fucking big club I belong to) who can't or don't want to talk about it publicly. I will, because I can, and it's my right to do so.

And so, on with the post, with an additional Trigger Warning: Don't read this if you're not feeling safe and comfortable with reading about experiences of physical & sexual violence.

Sometimes you can have known somebody for a long time- or a short time, but intensely. And they begin to speak, maybe in a monotone or maybe in exactly the same voice as they were just using to tell you about their weekend just gone. But what they are telling you is about the things, the deep, cutting, rupturing things that have made them who they are, without which you could never really know them. And it is difficult to know what to do with that knowledge, suddenly thrust, of their deepest, of their darkest, of their fault lines and their hair-triggers.

So I have a need, right now, to tell you these things, that I do not often or willingly share in public forums.

The first, and by now easiest, is about going to the desert, to Woomera in 2002, as a 19 year old university student, about being part of a liberation-by-force action, about coming face to face with the iron fist of the state and the people whose bodies suffered it directly.

This is what I wrote about it, back then, aged 19, just returned:

I've been in the desert. 1000 kilometers away from home, rescuing refugees from concentration camps. I don't know how far away news of my actions travelled because I've been cut off from phone, email, news and papers for almost a week (it feels like much longer). If you have heard of us in the news, please know that probably most of what you've heard has been lies. Just. You know. So you know.
I was there. In a great, flat desert where they lock people away for having the audacity to try to enter my country. I smashed down fences and fought back when the cops hit me and I pulled people out of captivity. I screamed and cried and ran with them and shielded them with my body and presence when they would have been recaptured. Some of the ones I was looking after were recaptured and I used my voice to call for cameras- not to record the police brutality, but to stop it. They stop kicking children when it's being recorded.
I have images burned into my memory that will never go away. Things have changed that will never change back. I'm not the same person I was before easter and the desert. The fine, clean red dust will never entirely wash out of my boots and jeans and balaclava. The children being bashed by police officers will never leave my mind. The fear and pride and shocking responsibility of liberating human beings will never fade.
I don't know how to move in the world I've come back to. I don't know how to talk to friends who weren't there. I don't know how to see the benign concrete jungle again and not a sinister parasite cloaking everyone I know and love in blind, complacent deceptions. I don't know how to cry about it and let it out. I don't know how to forget.

I never learned how to forget, and there are things that I have never been able to do since I came home from there. It's 7 years later now, and still: I have never been able to watch television, for example, or most movies. I can't- not won't, but CAN'T- deal with entertaining narratives of traumas being done to people. I can't go into supermarkets without breaking into cold sweats. I can't and refuse to engage in political arguments with emotionally removed people who create abstractions of human lives. I cry, often, and (in this cultural context) inappropriately. I care too much, and uselessly, and turn my energies to community activism (where I hope and believe I can make a difference) rather than that brutal real activism where I saw the truth, saw my powerlessness in the face of it, and was completely broken by it.

So. And. The other thing that I might tell you, in a light-hearted voice maybe to distract you from what I am saying, is that I care a lot about community actions around consent, and boundaries, and trust, and power, and abuse, and assault. And I care about these things because (and I will mumble this bit) my girlfriend used to rape me and ha ha ha well I mean I don't usually put that word to it because hey she's a woman and I'm a strong person and these things don't really happen and- I will go on, and on, and meander and monologue, but what I mean is: I said no, and my saying no meant nothing, and I learned to hate myself, and my body, and sex, and sexual response, because what I wanted, what I said, all of my proud feminist training and all of my sex-positive experiences meant nothing because when I said no, she kept going, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And the doubt, and the fear, and the re-writing of memories, and the deciding not to speak out about it (for what I felt were my very valid reasons at the time). And the having physical and intimate boundaries that are 40 foot high, topped with razor-wire, and patrolled not only by dogs that shoot bees out of their mouths when they bark but also sharks that have lazer-beams strapped to their foreheads. And being all of these things while also being a 26 year old polyamorous kinky queer dyke who likes to dress skimpy and do (in this cultural context) incredibly adventurous things in public. And dealing with the disconnect between that public persona, and the expectations that people produce from reading me out there, who then encounter me sitting on top of those 40 foot high personal walls, among the razor-wire. Thinking, you could not possibly ever want me enough to bother scaling these.

These aren't the only experiences that have formed me but they are the invisible ones, the ones that don't tend to be part of the grander or more casual narratives, the ones that, when they pop out, make people look at me differently and re-consider what they thought they knew. I'm an extrovert, and I thrive on being known and seen for what I am. Recently I have found myself declaring, more and more often, who and what I am. I am not so interested in simply claiming my "survivor" badge (although I do, and with pride). I care more about connecting with other people with similar experiences, with pooling our knowledge and beginning to understand what this shit means, all of it or little pieces of it.

I am coming to believe, a little bit, in the power of what communities are capable of doing when they're mobilised for the collective or individual good. I am becoming brave enough to pick up publications like the "World Without Sexual Assault" newspaper and wait til I get home before I start crying over it. I am learning that my personal response to trauma, which is (as it is for everyone) multifaceted but often winds up presenting as this proud and clear statement of my experiences: that this is useful for other people, and that it is, perhaps, worth my while to speak up.

Capsicum Anuum & Other Solenaceous Delights

2009-05-16T15:35:00.006+10:00

The hardest thing about moving out has been leaving my garden behind (again). At least this time the garden is still here, the plants all still merrily carrying on with life (last time I moved I had to dismantle my raised beds & destroy my plants in the productive rush of late summer- heartbreaking!). I visit often, and return to my new home with a bag full of fresh things to keep me going: kale, chard, basil, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, eggplants, capsicums, chillies. It turns out I have completely forgotten how to cook without ready access to fresh herbs & veggies (dried herbs? What are they?).

Today I went out and harvested this incredible load of capsicums and chillies: sweet and spicy both. The thing about growing these (and eggplants and tomatoes) in this garden has been observing the effects of what I knew was limited sunlight. This house is oriented so that by mid-Autumn the garden is almost completely shaded by the shadow of the house, and no sunlight is seen again til mid-Spring. It's one of the reasons I never grew too attached to the idea of being here long-term- gardening has taught me many things, including the profound and priceless value of winter sunlight. And even in Summer the sun situation never reaches what a European garden would require to be called full-sun, the 8+ hours they tell you you MUST HAVE in order to grow veggies. At the peak of Summer I think the best-exposed beds got, maybe, 6-7 hours of sunlight.

So, well, look: I grew veggies in those conditions. I grew even the heat-loving, sun-hungry veggies, with reasonable success. I've harvested scores, possibly hundreds of chillies off my assortment of chilli plants (made up of a '6-pack spicy' punnet mix from Bunnings which between them grow a dazzling array of colours and shapes, and a "Burke's Backyard Thai" that produces the darlingest little fire-orange chillies). Probably 20-30 eggplants over the season, between my "Casper" white eggplant (which has without question produced the best- started early and kept going all season, and STILL has 6 little baby eggplants growing on it now, on the edge of Winter!), the "Long Purple" Asian eggplants, and the sickly, surly but eventually productive Rosa Bianca. As for capsicums, the sweet bell-pepper varieties: well. I've harvested heaps, dozens, but they've all been green. And not one that I've left on the plant has ripened properly to red- they've only ever rotted before quite getting to full ripeness. And the same is true of the larger sizes of the chillies, these nice long horn-shaped ones (no idea what the variety is): dozens and dozens of green fruit, but nothing ripening.

So at a guess, I'd say that the larger fruit need more sunlight and longer seasons to ripen properly- and now, at this end of the season when they want to ripen, there's not nearly enough sunlight left in this garden to do it.

Which is not the world's greatest tragedy, really. Green capsicums are fine & delicious things, and it's been an excellent lesson in what you can do with less sunlight than is generally recommended. I've left green fruit on the smaller chilli varieties, because I think they might still get a chance to ripen, but I've cut all the green fruit off the bigger ones now. And the eggplants I'll give a few more weeks- they're still madly flowering and unfurling new leaves despite the severely restricted sunlight, so we'll see how they go growing fruit.

Other lessons imparted by the eggplants, capsicums & chillies this year:

these are LONG-SEASON plants. They go in in early Spring & stay up until, at least in Sydney, Winter. DON'T plan to put them in a bed that will be occupied til mid-or-late Spring, and DON'T plan to get in any Autumn crops in those same beds unless you're keen to rip out plants at their peak of productivity (Autumn is the real season for these- they grow & produce some through Summer, then go crazy-productive as the days shorten- did you know that? I didn't).
Feed them lots of potash, they like that.
Give them a good staking/caged support system- I didn't, and regretted it. I've been de-tangling heavy, fruit-laden branches all season, and finding sprawled branches lost in tangles of grass. Next time, I think, there will be cages.
Always harvest the chillies when they turn red, because removing one flush of fruit from the plant will encourage it to flower & set another flush of fruit.
And come up with a plan for your harvest, especially your chilli harvest- give it away to friends or find some chutney/relish/chilli jam recipes, because you will never go through the quantity of chillies produced (well, not if you have 7 plants) and it is ridiculously heartbreaking to throw them out when they've been sitting on the counter too long & gone bad.

A Thing Of Unsurpassed Beauty

2009-05-14T17:26:00.005+10:00

I finally finished my first tea cosy. I've been on a bit of a tea cosy fantasy rampage recently, not so much with the actual constructing of them but lots of thinking, reading, researching and daydreaming about them. Tea cosies- who DOESN'T need more in their life?

I made this one across two Monday meetings of the Tu-Tu Stitch'n'Bitch group (which is awesome, and if you're in the vicinity of Enmore on Mondays you should stop by). Finding a sad (tragic!) dearth of crocheted tea cosy patterns in my research, I decided to make this one by modifying a hat pattern on-the-fly. The hat pattern is this fantastic hat by Rheatheylia (which I highly recommend for the crocheted-hat beginner, it's incredibly easy to follow and makes a very fine hat indeed- nicely shaped & textured).

I modified it to create slits by, after the 5th row, only crocheting down one side for the next 6 rows (literally ending the row, chaining up, turning the cosy, and going back- reversing the pattern by doing backpost-double stitches instead of frontpost-double on every 2nd row). Tied off after the end of 6 rows, joined the yarn back in at the top of one of the slits, and worked across the other side for 6 rows to create 2 equal-length 'flaps', then worked another two rows all the way around to join the two slits and finish the cosy. Then I single-stitched rows of that feathery/lashes pink stuff along the ribbing/ridged effect in the original pattern. I think it looks a little bit like a sea urchin, what d'you reckon?

I've donated the tea cosy to the Tu-Tu space so we can use it to keep our tea warm on Monday nights, but I think now that I've made one there are many more tea cosies that need to be made for my home, friends, and the office.

The Only Constant

2009-04-27T16:56:00.004+10:00

It's only been a little over a year since I moved in- last February, in fact- and now off I go again. This has been, for real, an era, for me and for this household, and it's not easy thing to leave behind. I ache already in anticipation of missing the cats, my garden, the constant happy hum of chaos, the friends that have become cups-of-tea-together-every-morning family.

The last time I lived in a house like this- a sharehouse that became a family, an institution, practically a brand name- was before I left for America four years ago. It seems not coincidental that the vibrancy and possibilities of these big shared spaces are a powerful part of my movement onwards and away. It is possible for me to go to Europe now for having lived in this house, learnt these lessons, met and loved these people. And four years ago it was possible to go to San Francisco, to seek my leather queer homeland, because of what and who I became as part of that household.

My enormous, cluttered bedroom has been packed down into a few small boxes, all my furniture, all my crafting gear, most of my clothes distributed out into the world (mine no longer). A few boxes of photos and precious documents to be stored at my parent's house, but overall, well: I own vastly less stuff today than I did a week ago, and it feels fucking amazing.

Breaking these attachments is hard. Comfortable and safe are difficult things to give up.

The Great Cucamelon Mystery

2009-04-25T16:32:00.003+10:00

After I dug my potatoes up just after Christmas (too early, but they'd died of thirst over the break), I refreshed the potato plots with an extra layer of compost and planted two types of cucumber seeds, hoping for a late cucumber harvest (my early cucumber vines produced a measly 2 fruit then carked it).

Easily-identifiable cucurbit vines exploded out of the plots, and proceeded to take over the surrounding tomato, basil and herb pots, and then the lawn beyond. Thriving in a way that my earlier cucumber plantings never did, these babies were rocking out and reaching for the skies. I was initially a little concerned that they were compost-germinated pumpkin seeds, but the leaves were too small, and so were the flowers once they appeared.

Hooray cucumbers! I thought. The varieties I planted were 'Lemon' and 'Lebanese', and on one vine I found the long, narrow gherkin-type fruit embryo you'd expect on a Lebanese cucumber, and on the other a very round little fruit embryo. Not ever having grown a 'Lemon' cucumber before, I presumed these were it, and dutifully hand-pollinated for fruit set.

Except that, as they matured, those little round embryo fruits produced nothing like any 'Lemon' cucumber I can find on the internet. They were, instead, dark green and stripy, the size of a clenched fist, heavy and dense.

"Oh! Watermelons!" said everyone who saw them.

I've harvested 3 now at that clenched-fist size (as soon as the skin stops being fuzzy I pick them), and when they're cut open they look and smell like a cucumber but the flesh is incredibly sweet (delicious!), and the skin is quite tough to bite through. I am utterly mystified by what they are. I've not grown a watermelon before so I don't know how well I could identify the similarities between a cucumber and a watermelon vine. I have heard that immature watermelons sometimes are eaten as cucumbers, but I can't find any pictures of what the insides would look like in that case.

So my theories are: I've gotten a mis-labelled batch of seeds for some other variety of cucumber. OR watermelon seeds have germinated in the compost, and I am eating delicious immature watermelons as cucumbers. OR the seeds I planted resulted from a cross-pollination, and I am eating the surprisingly delicious and prolific result of accidental hybridisation.

Any other theories? Does this fruit look familiar to anyone out there? If it was earlier in the season I'd leave one of the fruit on the vine to see what it does as it matures, but we're verging on winter and I don't expect the vines to be productive for much longer.

Old zines

2009-04-22T01:52:00.002+10:00

I can't help but be distracted by my old zines sometimes, especially tonight as I struggle to pack up the endlessly complicated snowdrifts of things that define my physical reality, to sort them into piles of relevance and irrelevance, what will come with me, what will go, setting box after box of objects free to find other homes in the world, paring down to skeletal form those things that matter, are indelible and essential to me.

One day I will tell a grand narrative, and these zines, and the early days of this blog, and older diaries and blogs I've kept will be the raw material I'll build it from. I know this sometimes so strongly, more strongly than I know I will get on a plane on July 13th and travel to the other side of the world.

The way I loved and the way I wrote when I was 20 is so far from who and how I am today, and I feel so incredibly fucking lucky to have documented it so obsessively that I have a record, can visit myself then and feel the distance and closeness between these past and present selves. Sometimes the nicest thing is reminding myself that, although I tend to stare back at my ancient history and consider myself a fool in retrospect (all those times when things went so horrifically, forseeably wrong), I wasn't. I was deeply, profoundly and perhaps foolishly affected by turbulent emotional seas I hurled myself into, but I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't wasting my time.

Here's something I wrote when I was 20:
Do I miss you?
Of course I miss you.
I have always missed you-
In that way that we slip ever so slightly past each other, and can never make the real connection.
Here's to missing.
Here's to you.

And something else, an excerpt from a longer piece:
And she knows who I am the way I know who she is: we are not a first for each other but the same grim pattern pressed into our flesh where it meets, belly to belly, breast to breast, in our flesh where history is written before it happens.
"You will break me." I said, my mouth a whisper against her skin while she said nothing.
"I have to warn you-" she said, and oh, the noble attempts to save me from this but I will follow the paths I choose and she has as little power to refuse me as I have to pull away.

I like to read these things and remember that I had agency, despite memories of chaos and the sense of no control. And perhaps wider, clearer eyes then than now. Less fear, more life, despite that dreadful knowingness I have always carried with me. My ghosts and scars and foreshadowing that leave me always, always anticipating the heartbreak on the other side of every moment of passion or joy.

I can't quite pack these away into boxes to be archived at my parent's house, yet. I think I need to transcribe all of the words in all of my zines, so that I can play with and manipulate them in their digital form, see how they fit into the shape of the story I want to tell.

(End Of) Summer Song

2009-04-17T21:11:00.005+10:00

I've spent more time at the beach and in the water this past summer than at any other time in my life, I think. I've become a stronger swimmer, bought an expensive snorkel and mask, given in to this obsession. If I wasn't busily leaving the country what I'd be doing right now is saving up for wetsuit gear, an underwater camera, an open water SCUBA course and a few months on the Barrier Reef.

It's about joy, isn't it? Not just happiness, or doing what makes you happy, or not doing the things that make you miserable, it's about making sure you do a certain number of hours every single week of things that make you joyful. Snorkelling, following the darting of fish and the swirl of kelp and the refracted scattering of sunshine through the water's surface, brings me so much joy. It's nerd-joy, the joy of me as a kid with my hands poking and prodding under rocks and into tree trunks to see what I can find, and physical-joy too, the more recent joy of feeling strong and competent and able. And sensory-joy, descending into a place where sound and touch and sight are all so different.

I last went to the beach a week ago, and I don't know if that will be my last trip for the year but it could be (it's getting much cooler now, although the water was still warm). It was dusk- the sun is setting much earlier- and the water was murky. I had my snorkel mask on and could barely see a few metres ahead, to count the half-dozen sting-rays in my field of vision, and I had only been in a minute or so when I saw a massive dark shape cruise past and I thought, dimly and almost foggily: Holy motherfucking christ it's a motherfucking SHARK! I think I just about levitated myself out of the water, I moved so fast.

I love telling that story when I'm a bit drunk, because people get a little hypnotised by my voice and the backstory, and then jump about a foot in the air when the shark turns up. Sharks, apparently, are the world's greatest punch-line. Alarming as it was at the time (and I don't think I'll be snorkelling at dusk again soon), I'm so thrilled to have seen a shark in the open water. And I'm sad about leaving because I don't know how much ocean or snorkelling or sharks will be around in my life over the next few years, but I'm so happy to be leaving on a high note, to be leaving behind a life that I love. Because if it's no good, where I'm going, or I don't like it, I know I have somewhere beautiful to come home to.

Spiders I have recently loved

2009-04-08T23:53:00.008+10:00

Between the fence-side veggie beds and the middle-of-the-lawn veggie beds this spider builds his web. I've known about him for months, although I'd never seen him, because every day I'd break the web that blocked my passage from one end of the garden to the other, and every morning I'd find it re-built in exactly the same position. I was really curious as to who this industrious beastie was, who hid in the daytime and spent his nights building, so I went out tonight with my camera and a flashlight. I was not disappointed. Isn't he magnificent? His body is about the size of a 20 cent coin (Australian), and beautifully patterned in browns & gold.

Also magnificently enormous, two stunning Golden Orb Weaver spiders who've been building a sprawling spideropolis between our second-floor balcony and the telegraph poles opposite. They're at least 8cm long, glamorously gold & black, constantly building and repairing golden webs that glow like some other dimension of reality when the afternoon light hits them front-on. Now that it's solidly Autumn, the leaves from the trees on the street often fall into their webs. Tonight I sat on the balcony and watched as one of the spiders pulled the (comparatively huge) leaves out of the web, dropped them to the street below, and repaired the holes they had left.

These leaf-curl spiders are less glamorous than the Golden Orb Weavers, and to be honest I tend to ignore them a bit. They're kind of drab and brown, and I rarely see them getting up to much mischief. They proliferate all through the fence-edging beds, hanging their leaves and webs up on the bean trellises and strung from the eggplant stakes. I do rather like them though because they make me think of hermit crabs suspended in mid-air.

The Autumn garden is a gift, free of the disappointments of summer (damn my tomatoes this year, anyway. Damn them to hell and the compost pile). The eggplants & capsicums & chilis are producing like crazy and some late cucumbers I put in haven't done much by way of cucumbers yet, but they're fast taking over the entire lawn with lush green growth & bright yellow flowers. It feels less hectic now, more self-sufficient, less demanding.

Which is good, because I'm leaving, and having to detach myself from this garden. I'm still planting seeds- silverbeet, spinach, lettuce, kale, beetroot, turnips, carrots- but I know I won't be here at harvest-time. This is the second time in two years I'll be leaving a garden behind, but I'm glad that this time I got to see it through to the end of Autumn, to see this rush of bounty before the sun disappears and the cold sets in and all that the soil can grow is root crops and leaves.

I'm excited about seeing other gardens in other countries, other ways of growing things, other wisdoms, other systems. It's one of the reasons I've been pushing myself to go: the longer I stay here the more embedded in my own garden, my own soil I'll be, and there's so much to learn before I commit to that as fully as I'd love to, one day. There will be a time in my life for orchards and chickens and a decade of soil improvements, but I'm 26, and that time is not here yet.

And don't believe for a moment that you're healing yourself*

2009-03-23T00:00:00.007+11:00

I mostly hide it under scarves and ribbons. I've been pioneering this candy-dandy sort of look, a little bit cartoonish, with flowing scarves knotted up into giant ostentatious bows at my throat. Sometimes I just go for a Newtown Dyke Standard Issue Red Hanky, knotted at the back. Very, very rarely do I leave the house with it visible. I'm not anti-scar, but I am incredibly protective of this one. I'm shy of it, shy of sharing it. It still hurts, often, despite all the oils & potions I rub into it. And it's not a battle-scar, to be proudly displayed with accompanying tales of valour and heroics. The wounds of surgery, loneliness, isolation & vulnerability fade only slowly.

I wear those chunky black glasses now, every single day, from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. The world in sharp focus is a very strange thing and it is a strange new permanent accessory to adjust to (I will always and forever be a girl in glasses, and that's not a bad thing, but it's certainly different. A girl in glasses, with a scar).

Between them the glasses and the scar make me feel like an entirely different human being to the one I was six months ago, and when I add my bicycle into the mix I barely recognise myself. I look different, see differently, move around the world differently. I love these changes, actually, love all these superficial markers of being someone new. They make a pleasing counterpoint to the tidal wave of change of the year before that, when I became a gardener, karate-ka, crocheter and pragmatic hippy in a progression of identity-quaking months- worlds away from who I had been before- with no visual marker of the changes at all.

I'm packing up my room to leave- first this house, then a few months later, the country. Heading to Europe, well, that's the plan at least, and the plan is well underway. I don't know how long I'm going to be gone for and I'm so happy with that. Six months or a year or many years. I am tying up my loose ends here, and going to see what happens.

I'm happy to be leaving now, at this particular moment. I have such a life here, such a comfortable niche, and from comfort there can be fearlessness. And it pleases me that I'm not running from or to anything (or more pertinently, anyone) so I feel no fear of the adventure disappointing, and no fear of returning.

*from Rumi, 'Childhood Friends':
Trust your wound to a teacher's surgery.
Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,
those flies of your self-protecting feelings,
and love for what you think is yours.

Let a teacher wave away the flies
and put a plaster on the wound.

Don't turn your head. Keep looking
at the bandaged place. That's where
the light enters you.
And don't believe for a moment that you're healing yourself.

Exponential increase on every round

2009-02-21T18:28:00.003+11:00

The net is down at home and I've been without a camera since New Year- I feel like I am peeling away from my ability to document my life, and it frustrates me.

I'd love to show you a photo of my beautiful new ride, a vintage lady's step-over bike called Silvy (she has a handlebar basket and a backrack and oh she's so fucking beautiful!). She was found on the side of the road in Darlinghurst about a week ago and ever since I have been riding her everywhere, getting used to this riding thing faster than at any other time in the year since I learned how to do it.

Today I rode from Newtown to Oxford St and back again, wobbling on and off footpaths, around roadworks, up and down hills, and through the traffic on Crown St, hurtling forward wide-eyed and terrified with a death-grip on my breaks. When I ride on the road it feels like Death is riding side-saddle on my backrack, getting a dink down the hill, grinning at every car door that opens suddenly, every car that stops short to park, every invisible corner, every pedestrian who runs into the street in front of me. I picture the ghost bike memorials to dead riders, tighten my grip on the brakes, try to see everything that is happening in every field of vision, clench my jaw, ride on. Dismount at the other end with some relief and some disbelief that I have made it intact.

I've been crochet-mad and I'd like to show you some photos of that, too. I've been getting into lots of 'old lady lace' patterns, great swirling floral arches, relief-stitched, mathematical networks of diamonds stretching across space. Starting a new pattern is like the first few chapters of a mystery novel, wondering how it will form and take shape- what structure each base row lends to the row above it, and then the big reveal when I'm a few pattern-repeats in and it I can see it, see why it bends this way & that way & forms that shape there and this other shape here. It's quite two-dimensional, this current obsession, it's about starting with so many stitches on the x axis and making your way up the y axis, creating the stitch pattern as you go, winding up with a garment (gloves, cardigan, hat, scarf) at the end. 3-dimensional crochet, which creates toys and dolls and puppets and objects, generally, rather than garments, is an interest-in-waiting: it's there, but there's only so many hours in the day, so many days in the week.

My two-wheeled journey to Oxford St today was to meet a group who are bringing the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project to Sydney- the exhibition is in August, and I may not be here then, but how can I resist getting involved in something so perfect? It's nerdy maths, underwater obsession, and crochet all combined into a siren-song to lure me in.

Nothing that was broken when I last posted is fixed now, but it is a truth of the world that crisis-state can only exist for so long before it settles and reforms into a new sense of normal. Me and my bike and my obscure, nerdy projects, mostly alone, sometimes with strangers: that seems to be the new normal. I suppose I adapt.

Bones and dust and pretty words

2009-02-13T02:29:00.003+11:00

My 26th birthday was horrible, actually, and the month since has been a steady, glowering down-hill run. I have tried a thousand flavours of denial but actually, no, I'm not alright, things aren't OK. I am grey and grim and angry and disappointed- at myself, and at people I have been close to. I am bitter and secluded, sullen and exhausted.

I am aching for a friendship that ruptured, viscera bursting forth, around issues of loyalty and territory and trust. And I am disgusted to find, treading footprints of gore through the remains, that for every part of me that mourns it there is just as much that isn't sure I want it back. It was one of the cornerstones of my life for years, this friendship, and for all the other excuses I can find to be this sad, I'm pretty fucking sure that this rift is the real reason my world has been glowering grey, and still, amongst all the grief, I can't find any part of me that is reaching out and wanting it back.

I am disgusted at myself. I sit outside myself and watch as people try to connect with me, and I wonder why the fuck they're bothering. I can spin a pretty story about who or what I want to be at any given moment, at why and how and where I might produce my next grand adventure, the material for the next exciting episode of All About My Life, but can't they feel how far away I am, how every story is their tawdry little reward for pressing the right button and getting the rusty gears in motion, the disengaged monologue into play? That's not a connection, it's a performance. And it's not their lack, it's mine.

And I feel this crippling betrayal when I think about things I have seen and heard, things that made the world tilt sideways. People are not OK, sometimes, no, people hurt each other, and sometimes people I love, people I have unquestioningly looked up to, hurt people who are vulnerable to them in ways that feels like a punch to my gut. I have been able to dismiss, to write away the abuse that I have suffered at an ex-partner's hands, because that was my story, and I can spin a great morality tale and besides look I got out and look how well I'm doing now! But there is no daytime television happy ending in seeing my friends do this. It feels like the edges of the world have peeled back and everything beyond this lie of community, this lie of love and connection, is just bones and dust and pretty words.

Slithery slidey beautiful things

2009-01-30T01:32:00.006+11:00

This snake doesn't have a name. He's a black-headed python belonging to a lovely friend I've made recently, who turned up wearing him across her shoulders at Bad Dog a few weeks ago. She's a tall and imposing femme, wearing that night a pretty pink frock and this stunning long snake around her shoulders and in her hair. She let me handle him for hours and hours- I danced with him coiling smooth and beautiful around my shoulders, then 'snake-sat' outside with him for longer hours. The mysterious strength in that body, those rippling ribs, the back-and-forth sway! I love it, I love it so, so much. It was such a joy. I was lit up with happiness.

About a week before that, while visiting the Coogee Women's Baths with Miss Y, I found an octopus. It was hiding beneath a ledge in a rock pool on the platform that extends around the edge beyond the baths, the inter-tidal zone that always sends me sideways with excitement ("Look! A sea slug!" I exclaim to bored friends, who smile tolerantly or roll their eyes depending on the mood). I was picking my way across the rocks when a liquid-fast flicker of movement caught my eye, and I crept in further and saw tentacles as thick as two of my fingers raised up to shield the octopus from view. I could see it, though (you don't fool me!)- could see tentacles, suckers the size of a finger-print, eye staring, siphon rippling gently as water passed through it. I took about five seconds to decide that it wasn't a blue ring (too big, and no blue rings), and stuck my hand into the rock pool to investigate closer. It reacted to my hand with a swirl and flicker of tentacles, which was all I wanted- to see it in motion. So beautiful, I am in love that motion of muscle become liquid. The first octopus I have ever seen in the wild, and it was as gorgeous as I have always imagined. I have looked every time I've been there since, but there have sadly been no re-appearances.

Tides

2009-01-27T02:07:00.002+11:00

1. I drove to Melbourne, I performed, I drove home. It was a long, long way, more time spent driving than we spent being there. And really, I didn't drive- I was in a car, being driven. We were on tour, the four of us. We took that show on the road.

2. Everything changes, and the nature of life is change. I miss having an unshakeable faith in permanence. I miss it even though it was constantly smashed up by the inevitable changes- I miss it even though I was often crippled by the chaos and grieving when change came (as it does, and always will). I falter often as I strive to live with change, but it doesn't matter- that's the point. Change comes whether you're ready for it or not, whether you greet it with open arms or scream at it in rage and impotent, useless frustration. Change comes to those who welcome it, to those who bar the door to it, to those who ignore it, to those who hope it will pass them by.

3. She's been such a good friend to me, and we have connected in ways pitch-perfect to what I want or need or crave in my life (in this place, in this moment). My life has been different, better, richer for her. And she is leaving, the same way she came. She tells me she will keep me, and I know it's true, and people say: "But she'll be back", and I think, well, maybe. That doesn't matter, not really. This, now, is beautiful, and it's over. And another thing, another time might be beautiful, and in other places and as other selves we may connect again. But this beautiful thing, right now, ends, and without trying to cling to it I can be sad for it. Let it go, and be sad for it's passing, and still let it go.

4. She taught me a lot of this. We sat and cried onto each other's shoulders and let it pass through us. "Endings are hard". And I let it run through me, grief without the need or desire to change anything. Grief without trying to hold back the tide of change.

A pinch of writer, a dash of performer: incongruous flavours, but somehow they work.

2009-01-22T18:28:00.004+11:00

So, I am filling out invoices to send off so that I may be paid for writing work I did last year. I don't think I ever recorded those achievements here, as lost as I was in the land of illness, surgery and recovery. But they make me proud, so very proud (one day I'll be a writer, mum, I promise!), so I will share them with you. Here is a small piece of smut, written on the bus one day into the phone in my hand while I daydreamed about a date at the pub later that night. And here is a commissioned piece, the cover-story for the issue no less, which was hard work but such a thrill to produce.

And sometimes I dance on stages or on podiums, dressed or not so dressed, for queer audiences, mostly women. Sometimes it feels like a commercial transaction, this much bump'n'grind for this much cash. Sometimes it's really simple, like, I wanna go to that show and I can go for free if I put on some interesting-looking outfit and let women push pretend money into my knickers for 20 or maybe 40 minutes. Sometimes it's a great big deal, fully-costumed, with weeks of rehearsals and music editing, there are characters and props and names on flyers and lighting run-throughs. Sometimes people, event organizers, ask for me specifically, as though for me to dance for their event is something special, and sometimes I catch this momentary glimpse of myself out the corner of my eye, being that girl, on that stage, in those lights, with all those people watching. Then it's over, and I never know quite what to say to the people who want to talk to me about it afterward.

I've been rehearsing a show all week. I'm heading to Melbourne to perform it on Saturday night, and then I'll be coming home. It is as surreal to contemplate being invited to another city to dance naked on a stage as it is to print invoices for payment from nationally-distributed magazines for stories of mine that they've published.

I'm a busy girl, living a lot of lives, and sometimes they threaten to crush me beneath their weight, beneath the pressure of it all, and sometimes I feel like I can fly.

Some facts about my life right now, and some conclusions

2009-01-20T01:20:00.003+11:00

1. I'm as healthy as I'm ever going to get. And I'm no longer tied to the hospital, the endocrinology department, the doctors, with the same short tether that I was. 8 years of chronic illness, of constant management, and now: well. I will never be free of it, but this is as free as I will ever be. Me, a prescription, and a set of drugs that can never be more than a few days away from refrigeration.
2. I don't owe anyone any money. Or, well, a little bit, but it's not much. It's nothing serious. It's peanuts. It can be gone soon.
3. I'm single. My life is attendant on nobody else's, my decisions are my own, my time is own to spend as wildly as I choose.
4. I hate my job.
5. It's comfortable here, and it's lovely, but... but. I do so love to push myself.

And in light of these facts, I look and look around my life in Sydney, I feel the love and bask in the glow, and I think: if not now, when?. And I think: I'm done, here, for now.

Which is scary because here is safe, and love, and beautiful moments. But here is also this constant tide of people who come and go, who make me love them and then leave, and I can choose to be left behind or I can choose to join that global tide of young humanity, for a little while. The longer I stay here the deeper the roots I want to put down- I want to find land, build an orchard, raise chickens, make perfect rich dirt- and I know that it's just not my time for that yet. Not now, not quite yet. And I can mark time here, I can tread water, having a lovely time in the same very few places for the next few years until it is time to put down those roots. Or I can go away, and scare myself, and live my life in a backpack, out there somewhere. Across the seas.

I think: Might as well, eh? Home will always be here for me, and I can always come back. A return ticket is a beautiful thing.

These are thoughts I have been having in my past beautiful month of holidays, and I don't know how well they will survive through tomorrow's re-launch into The Real World (with all it's attendant unpleasantness), but I will see. I am plotting, and planning, and thinking about staying on sofas in London. Yes.

Letters from concerts to my previous selves

2009-01-18T02:30:00.002+11:00

Nick Cave, firing up the stage, belting out Red Right Hand with this fierce, growling depth. And I'm in the audience grinning from ear to ear, feeling the guitars thrum through me, feeling that voice surge up my spine, feeling myself at 15 or 16 years old shouting the lyrics to that song alone in my bedroom, feeling myself raise my voice now, at 26, to shout it out with this crowd pressing in at my elbows. And smile for myself, blow a little kiss from me now to me then, reach out to the memory of myself younger, less formed, with a forgiveness and empathy that takes me completely by surprise.

Which is not the first time in the past 12 months that I have felt that strange, time-travelled sensation, being fully in my present self but connected intensely to a previous version of me, or myself at some very specific prior moment in my life. I felt it when I saw Peaches perform live about six months ago, too. Dancing and singing and surging with the crowd, feeding our energy to her hungryrock-star self and us, the crowd-organism, feeding back from her. I was 25 and swinging my hips and raising my fist in the air ("Fuck the pain away! Fuck the pain away! Fuck the pain away!" like a mantra to a grinding beat) and I was 19 and dancing in someone's dingy lounge-room to that song with my eyes closed and feeling my body in a cluster of women, loose and fierce, for the first time ever. And then, at that concert, when the artist crowd-surfed her way over my head and left a boot-print in my forehead, I surged forward to grab and lift and push her onwards, and thought: This is for you, sweet thing, and sent it off to that earlier self like a blessing, like a gift.

Is it a tying up of loose ends, now, a resolving of things? An arrival, a settling into myself now, an ability to take stock, to see where I am and where I've come from a little more clearly? That's part of it but it's this incredible sense of forgiveness, of empathy, of understanding that takes me by surprise. I think of myself, my clumsy younger selves, my mistakes and my failings, I think of my fierce curiosity and my fast-talking ways, I think of how I refused to ever be a beginner or a learner of anything, insisted instead on leaping into everything as a fully-formed, if completely fabricated, expert. I think about how far that girl got, and the places she didn't go, and the beautiful moments and the ugly ones, and I no longer cringe away from it. I forgive her, and I love her, and I treasure her, and I send her these little gifts of moments, like being grown-up enough now to be at the concerts of her idols.

I want to tell my 16 year old self, surging with emotions I could not yet name as I yelled along to the Nick Cave songs on my stereo, that there is a life that she can't see yet, but that she can feel, and that she's right: it's way, way better than the one immediately around her.

And I want to tell my 19 year old self, tingling with the possibilities of all of these fierce queer bodies, of this grinding music and these hot beats and the desire for things barely yet articulated, that she will go there, she will do amazing and creative things with her own body and others, and it will be every bit as fucking fantastic as she is so fervently imagining.

And I want to tell them both that I forgive every sharp, awkward edge, every bump and bruise and ugly bit, and that I love their vulnerability and their dreams, and that I hope they'd be as proud of me, now, as I am of them, then.

Coming, going, staying

2009-01-06T20:34:00.002+11:00

It's too much to write about, too much to talk about, too many days and too many adventures and too many headspaces later. It's perfect, it's everything I want, it's the Grand Carnival, it's perfect and disastrous and wild.

More than a week of increasingly more spectacular water-holes, private and perfect, of swinging and leaping from rope swings, of lounging in waterfalls with the water pounding down over my shoulders, of clambering slippery-wet and completely naked in the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Of a farm full of strutting queers in high finery, of simmering and sinuous sexual tension, of storms that ripped apart the sky, shredded tents and trees, left us gaping and awestruck.

I went to the big party, the New Years party, in a tutu & harness set I made that day. There are photos of me wearing it in the first light of New Wear's day, sprawled across the lap of someone very tall and very handsome. We are sharing a cigar, smiling and smug, so pleased with ourselves, with the party, with the world.

Once the sun was fully up, New Year's Day was lost to this ferocious, intense heat with humidity that felt like we were living inside a sweaty, lubed-up, cum-stained glove. There could be no sleeping off the night before, it was so hot that even shifting position slightly brought on a full-broken sweat. We lay limp, muttering and incoherent, useless in the face of it.

Still awake, with no sleep in me, I spent the recovery party reclined in a full-body hug on a hill watching a massive electrical storm build over the hills. We whooped and cheered as loudly as we had for the fireworks the previous night as the lightning tore the sky apart, and finally the heat broke with a burning explosion of dust and wind and then fierce, pounding rain. We were herded inside off the hill for our own safety, corralled in a dance hall while the storm raged wild outside. It was a storm that completely changed the shape of the night, as tents were destroyed and trees came down across roads and campsites. I was awake at dawn, again (still), watching gentle rain on a battered landscape from the dry comfort of a bandstand. Peeled raw by sleeplessness, held gently, smiling at the world.

And around those big parties there have been the eddies and swirls of life at the farm, a glamorous cabaret, a flirtation here and there, a filthy, bloody and oh-so-satisfying date with two of my dearest friends, there has been hanging out with the high-kicking little calves and the peep-peep-peeping baby chicken, napping in the back of a mustard-yellow truck or passed out in the hammock on the porch or hanging out with a darling friend who is living in the doghouse (literally).

Disasters, of course: I lost my phone AGAIN New Year's night, which has made every movement a logistical nightmare. And although I survived the loss of my beloved phone with chin up and shoulders back, I was reduced to tears by the fact that after wandering through ankle-deep water on the night of the flood my amazing, one-of-a-kind hot-pink-and-white patent cowgirl boots have begun to disintegrate. I am so distraught by their impending loss, I can't even bear to contemplate it.

I'm in Brisbane now, doing it oldschool, early-90's style, making my way around the world without a mobile phone. I make firm plans to be places at times (remember doing that?), and have a little book with a list of numbers and a wallet full of change. This is a new and different phase to the holiday, now that I've left the farm and the gentle embrace of the Northern Rivers, but I am so very much loving not being at home, I am in no rush at all to be back. I can feel that it might become time, soon. But not yet, no, not for a while.

Notes from time-out-of-time

2008-12-22T23:02:00.002+11:00

The solar year ended and began again at 12:04pm yesterday, at the moment of the Solstice (at which point I was busily sleeping off my hang-over from a very enjoyable Kooky the night before). So as far as I'm concerned, 2008 is OVER. But 2009 doesn't really start till 12:01AM on January 1st. By my own calendars, the 10 days between December 21st and December 31st are no-time, belonging to no year. This is time out of time.

I marked the passing of the Solstice, the ending and beginning of the solar year, by writing three lists about the year gone. Good Things, Bad Things & Things. I wrote the lists in a pretty notebook, and decorated them with gold and silver sparkling pens. I was sitting in a park with two beautiful new friends, soaking up the last sun of the longest day of the year. When my lists were finished I tore them up and set them on fire. First I burned the Bad Things (goodbye!), then I burned the Things (farewell!), then I burned the Good Things (I will remember you). Then the year was done with, a pile of burnt paper at my feet, leaving the smell of eucalyptus burning in the leaves beneath my little pyre and the feel of the sun on my face.

And then it was truly time out of time, this peaceful-raucous river-running time of festival, of plenty, of special moments between years. We left the park when the sun finished setting and tumbled around on the trampoline at home for a while, then ventured out (why not?) to dance away the shortest night of the year. I woke up late today and took myself to the beach, met with clusters of friends on the grassy hillside, hot sun, cold breeze, crashing waves. Came home from the beach and installed myself on the trampoline again, madly crocheting gifts with a cat purring on my lap. Was found by my housemate out there, and we harvested veggies from the garden together for dinner. Normal, beautiful things that should be every-day but usually aren't.

Today I have found my thoughts straying back to the narratives that have dominated the year just gone, storylines that have haunted me, and found myself able to shut them away. No slamming of doors, no denial of what's happened, just a gentle redirection. I can look forward without carrying it all with me, now, or I can look to the beautiful things immediately around me. I have said goodbye to this year, to everything that was beautiful and heartbreaking and challenging about it. I am physically and emotionally a different person for having lived through it (the same is true of every year, but the physical differences are so marked this year- my scar, the absence from my innards of that gland, the presence of muscles I have never had before- this is quite the changed landscape). And now isn't really for looking to the year ahead, not yet. Now is for taking a break from all of it, for floating along this current of festival-time and time-out-of-time, for holding the immediate and present close, and easy, and true.

Things I Have Recently Grown

2008-12-15T02:35:00.006+11:00

I know I have mentioned it already but I am rich right now in beans & squash above all else (squash, you want squash? I have dark green zucchinis, pale green Lebanese zucchinis, adorable ruffled golden patty-pan squash, warty-skinned crookneck squash- and the beans, well, the Purple King are a bounty, the Blue Lakes are just warming up, and the Windsor Long Pod bush beans have just finished their season). The tomatoes are all green and limping along to ripeness- it's anyone's guess if I'll actually get any before they all die from some horrible disease. There's chilis on every chili plant and a new crop setting on the white eggplant, and the lemon tree is ripening a huge crop of small fruit. The strawberries are coming in strong, the silverbeet and lettuce are wilting in the heat, the potatoes are flowering, I've harvested my first (EVER!) cucumbers and broccoli and there's more of both coming.

I struggle with wanting to keep planting now, even though the solstice is looming and I worry about it being too late. I have new varieties of both bush and pole beans I want to try, two squash varieties that didn't make it in the first batch, new sweet pepper seedlings coming up, and a Purple Cherokee tomato seedling in need of a home. There's never enough room, never enough garden for all of everything I want to grow. I doubt there ever will be.

Older lovers & garden bloggers

2008-12-11T01:44:00.003+11:00

Two things happened tonight. Well, many more than two (I dyed my hair, put on a dress, went back out to the dyke bar for the first time in quite a few weeks). But I wanted to tell you about these two things.

The first is that I walked in, sober in a pub just hitting it's peak (full of energy but not yet slurring), at the same time as the first shows were on. I bought my beer and stood behind a table to watch the shows. The first act was two people I know (sort of- we're not close), two performers within a few years of my age. They're good performers, I enjoy their shows, and this one was funny and fun to watch. I noticed halfway through their act that at the table in front of me were seated the two much older, very butch partners of the people onstage, and I thought, oh, it's Daddy's club. And more than I watched the act, I watched the older partners watching their younger partners onstage, saw from behind crow's feet crinkling above sharp cheekbones as they smiled and watched their young lovers perform for the crowd. Watched them clap and cheer and hoot, exchange glances full of pride. Later I watched them leave, the taller, older partners first, the younger ones trailing behind, all fully laden with the paraphernalia of performance.

I wasn't prepared at all for the cloud of whatever watching that brought up in me, much more fiercely than seeing only one instance of it ever does. Somehow the two plus two made it sharp and fierce and present like it hasn't been for a long, long time. I haven't missed the role of Daddy in my life in years, haven't craved that proud paternal presence, haven't really wanted to live being witnessed and appreciated by someone older and wiser than me.

The last lover I had that I called that was in San Francisco, 3 years ago now, a sharp, handsome creature who turned 50 while we were seeing each other, who took me to the fair at the beach and we went for rides on the sky-car. She bought me a very pretty dress and held my hand while I skipped down the street.

And I have wrestled with growing older, and what it means to be someone who has traditionally dated people so much older than me when I am growing beyond the point of needing a protector or a guide in my lover. I have dated so little recently that it's barely crossed my mind, or if at all I have thought of my most recent girlfriend, who was certainly not my Daddy but who was quite a bit older than me, enough years that our behaviour and ideals clashed but not so much that she could be benevolent and tolerant of me, and I have thought: I need to stop doing this. I need to stop being little, I need to grow up, I need to challenge myself with whatever it is that scares me so much about connecting with people my own age.

The years of not being Daddy's girl have been good for me. I own myself so much more than I did when I was 22, and craved a kind word or a harsh reprimand to validate every single thing I did. I have had lovers in these years who were 15-and-more years older than me yet who bent to my will and purred under my touch and were vulnerable to me in ways that those Daddies could never countenance. Who read strength and power in me, who craved it and chased it and gave me the gift of seeing myself as strong and powerful.

So, I was not expecting to react to that sight that I saw tonight, but I did, and I don't know what it means.

The second thing that happened tonight was that someone told me about their garden, and said: I was so inspired by your blog, I had to!, and I suddenly realised how little I have written on here about my garden recently. My blog, she is in identity crisis, and I am conflicted about whether this is a place to write about my garden or my messy heart or a place to pretend to have a coherent narrative in which everything makes perfect sense. But I am trying to sort that out, because I don't want to lose any of it. I want to tell you about my plants, because they matter to me, but I want to write about my life, as well, as much as I can (forgive me that I go so easy on the details, it seems the safest option for everyone).

I have some ideas about how to make this work, all these many different directions my life is spinning out in, how to make the best use of my bright new passions without losing this messy narrative of heart and life that I find so valuable. Stay tuned.

Vegan spaghetti bolognese recipe

2008-12-08T21:08:00.006+11:00

I made this very tasty vegan spaghetti bolognese recipe tonight and thought I would record it for future reference. I neglected to take any photos- spaghetti bolognese is not the most photogenic of dishes- so this is not an awesome, sharp-looking cooking blog kind of post. Just a recipe.

Makes a share-house quantity of bolognese sauce, so use a big pot.

Ingredients
2 onions, diced
8 cloves of garlic, minced
1 1/2 C dry soy mince (we get ours in a big bag for $5 from Vegan's Choice on King St)
2t veggie stock powder
1/2C dry sliced shiitake mushrooms
Ends of sad veggies from bottom of veggie bin, finely chopped. I used yellow squash, zucchini, capsicum & green beans
2x 375g tins of whole peeled tomatoes
Lots of tomato paste. Maybe 5T.
1/2C chopped, pitted kalamata olives
Fresh or dried bay leaf. Mine was fresh.
2t fresh thyme leaves, stripped & chopped
Small sprig of fresh rosemary, chopped finely
Large sprig, maybe 2t worth of fresh oregano leaves, chopped finely.
Salt & pepper
Spaghetti

Method
1. Dissolve the veggie stock powder in a little boiling water in a big bowl, add the dry soy mince to the bowl, then add hot water til all the soy mince is covered. Stir so the veggie stock is evenly mixed through.

2. In another bowl, cover the dried mushrooms with boiling water.

3. While everything is rehydrating, chop up your onion, garlic & veggie odds & ends, and put a big pot of water on the stove to boil for your pasta.

4. Sauté onion over low-ish heat in olive oil til they're clear, add garlic, cook for a further 2 minutes.

5. Throw in your veggie odds & ends & stir through.

6. Drain the soy mince in a strainer, press out as much stock as you can. It has now done it's job. Throw the soy mince into the pan, stir through.

7. Strain the mushrooms over a bowl so you're saving the mushroom juice. Chop the mushrooms finely, then throw them in the pan and stir through.

8. Open the tins of tomatoes and use a big knife to slice them up inside the can. Throw into the saucepan and stir through. Add about 3T of tomato paste now, and more later if you think it needs it. Add the olives, too.

9. Mine was a bit dry at this point so I added some of the mushroom juice to the pan. Add bay leaf. Simmer for about 10 minutes, while your spaghetti is cooking.

10. Your big pot of water should be boiling by now- throw your spaghetti in with some salt.

10. Add the thyme & rosemary right before you drain the spaghetti, then drain the spaghetti, then turn the heat off the bolognese sauce and add the oregano. Oregano can't stand up to much cooking, so you need to add it right at the end. Also, at this point if you can find your bay leaf in there, fish it out so someone doesn't accidentally eat it.

11. You'll want to add pepper, but go easy with adding salt- between the olives & the stock this will already be pretty salt-happy.

12. Put spaghetti in bowl. Put bolognese sauce on top. Eat.

I ate mine with parmesan cheese because I am not actually vegan. My vegan housemates enjoyed theirs just as much minus the cheese.

About help

2008-12-05T09:55:00.003+11:00

This post is not a cry for help. By the time I am able to articulate these things, I am no longer in a space where I need help. These are reflections on the past week-and-a-half of trying to recover from major surgery in a mad sharehouse situation, learning some very steep, very harsh lessons about when and how and who it's worth asking for help.

I have been struggling, hard. And it's nearly impossible to write about because everybody is so well intentioned, and so lovely, and it's not their fault that my need for help and their ability or willingness to deliver it fall so far from each other. The gap between those two points, with my need for help on this side and their ability to deliver it on the other side: that's fraught, dangerous territory. I can't point it out without offending people who are, after all, helping me in whatever way they can. But I can't erase my need for help, either. I can only sit here and wish that the people who assured me of their willingness & capability to help, when I was arranging these things before my surgery, who find themselves in the event to be unable to help, were able to say to me: It turns out I can't help you. Let me help you to find someone who can.

The suggestion that I should have just gone back to my parent's house and avoided burdening my friends with these needs is always there. And I think about it, think about recovering far from the reach of visitors, far from my garden, in a house full of people I am fond of but not necessarily close to, in a house full of meat where it would have been a struggle to find anything I could eat, in a house where there is no spare room for me so the chances are good I'd be stashed in the study between boxes of books. I think about the anxiety on my mum's face when she said: "Where are you planning on going after hospital?", and the relief when I said: "My house". I think about the fact that my house is three blocks from the hospital, while my parents live 40 minutes away.

I think about the fact that when I got my stitches out on Tuesday I walked down to the hospital by myself, because there was nobody to ask for help, nobody to come with me. Wobbled out again on unsteady legs, sat on a warm brick wall and had to wait for long minutes to get up the strength to keep walking up the street. And I thought about what would have happened if I'd been staying at my parent's house, the very high chance that neither of them would have been able or willing to take the day off to come with me. So I would have had to catch the train all the way in anyway, and been in much the same state afterwards but further from safety. I think about how, in matters of illness, I have always been expected to be remarkably self-reliant by my family, and that this is probably why my adamant refusal to return 'home' to recover surprises my friends, whose families allow the reasonable expectation of the experience of 'being looked after' when they're incapacitated.

I think that at the core of me, I expect to have to look after myself (I recovered from my first surgery in a prescription-drugged-out daze, alone in a skanky flat in Wollongong, aged 18, scared and stubborn and with no friends at all- my family weren't much help that time either. My expectation of no help from them is evidence-based, not presumptive). But somehow the chorus of offers of help and support, when I was scared and pitching headlong towards the surgery date, convinced me that to receive help was normal, a thing I could comfortably expect. I even brought myself to ask for help, which is something that I clearly & obviously struggle with. I felt so assured, so confident in this warm bubble of support. I had my primary support-person lined up to help me out with hospital drop-offs and pick-ups, and assurances of practical help from housemates. People said: "Is there anything you need?" and I said: "Soup. Food is the biggest thing. I don't know how sociable I'll be, how up for visitors, but if you can make some food that would be awesome. Thanks". I was confident. I was set.

And so. Some people's lives have exploded, and it's not their fault, or an indictment of them, but I fall off the radar. Other people's attention spans are short, and maybe when they see me up and walking and tending to my garden, they forget that I ever asked for help (they say "You're looking so well!", filled with relief of being let off the hook, because if I look so well I couldn't possibly actually still be in need of help). And people do help, they are generous and lovely and leave parcels of food or come around with treats to distract me. But still, here I have been, with this yawning gap between the help I need and the help I'm receiving, thinking: what did I do wrong? Everyone tells me that I need to learn to ask for help, but I did ask for help, and it didn't work.

The first lesson my stubborn, independent soul wants to learn from this is that I was right the first time, that there is no greater strength than self-sufficiency. That I should have made my own vats of soup before I went into hospital, and frozen them for later, should have shut myself into my room and expected nothing. I don't think that's right lesson. I think what I need to have learnt is to set contingency plans in place (and a vat of self-made soup in the freezer is not a bad place to start), to be very clear and very direct about the help I might need, and to be specific (said one friend: "If you'd asked one person for one pot of soup, you might have got soup, but you asked 10 different people, so they all probably thought someone else was doing it"). To enlist from people who volunteer to help an assurance that if they find themselves for whatever reason unable to help in the ways planned, they will let me know, and have a back-up plan for someone to pass the job of helping me on to.

What I have definitely learnt is that the fuzzy post-surgical, doped-up-on-painkillers state is no time to be having to negotiate the finer points of ego, of ability, of ruffled feathers, of faltering promises. That this stuff needs to be crystal clear, concrete, with three layers of contingency plan built in before I arrive at such a state, because once I am there I can do nothing to help myself or the people around me.

My anger at the people who I feel have let me down is passing. I don't really blame them. It's not actually their fault that their lives exploded, and that they found themselves unable to help me in the ways I was relying on them for. It's just incredibly unfortunate that I didn't think about needing back-up plans, and that they were unable to think of them for me. It's unfortunate that in my time of need I was unable to articulate what was going on clearly enough to procure the help I needed elsewhere, that by the time I was able to sort through it enough to ask, I was no longer in a state to need it. Unfortunate that you don't learn these lessons until you really, truly have to learn them.

So. I have learnt. I will use what I've learnt for myself, because I will probably need surgery again in the New Year to correct the damage this disease has done to my eyes (and that's a whole terrifying concept I don't even want to go into). And I will use what I've learnt for other people who find themselves sick or otherwise in need of help. I have learnt: that food is love. That errands are a blessing. That nobody who is sick or recovering from surgery should ever, ever have to wash the dishes. That a sick person needs more than one front-line support person- probably they need an errands & practicals support, and a household support, and an emotional support (in addition to food support, which is the best role for people on the second line- good friends & acquaintances who want to help in small, concrete ways). That the fact that someone can walk, and talk, and answer the phone (or even shower, dress, potter in the garden and otherwise look quite functional) doesn't mean they're actually fully able to feed & manage themselves. That when someone says: "I have friends helping me", it might be a good idea to say: "Which friends? What's their phone number? Let me give them my phone number in case they need back-up".

For garden voyeurs

2008-11-30T02:35:00.001+11:00

Just after I wrote that blog post I went over to my garden journal and added a whole lot of harvest posts: read them here. Features hot photos of squash, beans, eggplants & broccoli.

Dirt & Love

2008-11-29T21:35:00.006+11:00

Lying in bed last night, overtired and straining for sleep through painkiller fog, I had this intense vision of my hands in the dirt, of worms crawling over and through my fingers. I have photos like this, taken while filling a new raised bed with worm-rich compost. I thought: it's my thing, the dirt. And I thought of people that I have wanted to be close to, people that I have hungered for, and thought: their thing is blood, and flesh. And it's not that they were opposed to earth, or that I am opposed to blood and flesh (gardening has not distracted me from my love affair with the extremes of what it's possible to do with the human body & mind), it's just that the elements that really compelled us were not quite the same. I realise that it is not a slight, that they have reached past me for people whose fixation more closely mirrors their own.

I don't think I've ever connected romantically with someone who is genuinely inspired by dirt. My love affair with dirt is so new, and the year-or-so since it began has been a strange and infertile emotional landscape for me (for reasons unconnected with dirt). I laid in bed and wondered what it would be like, if it ever happened, to connect passionately with someone who understood. It washed over me, right then: dirt, and love, and growing things.

I can't be a harmless eccentric or have a cute little hobby. It's not like that. It's a religion, a devotion, an obsession, something that I can pour endless, countless hours into without it ever becoming work. My mum and I went out to visit Jackie French's amazing garden the other weekend and she said: "Nothing I have done here has changed this land as much this land has changed me". I am being changed, actively and every day, by the garden I have now and the gardens I build in my mind. My life will shape itself differently because of this. I have different dreams, and will find myself in different places.

It's not just about beauty, and it's not just about food, although it's partly those things. I stood in my garden today in a sunny patch between thunderstorms, and felt it for one of the first times not as something I am creating, something in process, but something that is created, and continuing to create itself. It will never be finished but it's no longer the garden I am trying to build. It really is a garden now, a food wilderness that spans the entire length of the fence of this very long property and strays well into the middle of the yard as well. There is ego and pride there, of course, I made that!, and awe: that things grow, that they want to grow, is such a gift.

I looked over my small potted orchard: my little lemon, lime and kaffir lime trees, the strawberries, my blackberry cane leafing out, and thought about the additions I'm planning (fig, pomegranate and blueberry, loads more strawberry varieties). Things that live longer than a year, take more than a few months to produce: commitments. It's a different scale to the annual veggie garden, which I would be sad to leave but know that with a patch of sun and available compost, I could recreate wherever I landed. It makes me think things about permanence that are very new to my head.

The annual veggie garden is a delight, a thrill every single day right now. I am harvesting beans & squash & lettuce & silverbeet like crazy, the eggplants are trickling in, and the tomatoes are loaded with fruit inching it's way to ripeness. I realise that it's a struggle for me to be out there without working on it, that for me to sit still in my garden is almost impossible. I think of my mother, exactly like this, chatting away but every minute running her finger over a leaf, plucking a weed, rearranging something on a trellis. Or struggling to sit still with a cup of tea in her hands, but her eyes darting about the whole time, cataloguing the things she will do the minute she can leap into action. There's a lot I can't do right now due to the surgery I'm recovering from, but there's a lot of just peeking in-between foliage, watching fruits swell from the calyx of spent flowers, observing the ecosystems of insects. And of course, there's the harvesting to occupy me.

The Interview

2008-11-24T11:05:00.002+11:00

Strawberry Delight flowers, pretty and pink in a hanging basket on the back fence. These are so decorative that if the actual fruit quality is any good I'm going to make sure I buy loads more next year. They look gorgeous.

I'm trying to get dressed for the hospital, which is a strange process. I currently look like I'm dressed for a job interview. I wanted something button-down, to avoid having to pull anything over my throat tomorrow, but they're all work-shirts. And a long, comfy skirt that I can wrap myself up in, but all my long skirts are quite tailored and fancy. So I'm dressed more corporate-casual right now than I ever, ever am for work. Hello, hospital, please to be employing me and then cutting me open?

I've been a bit crazy for a few days (my housemates might dispute that time-limitation, and whisper behind my back: for ever). I've not been smoking so I've been a bit nervously anti-social, trying to avoid situations where I'm going to want to. There was a huge party at my house on Saturday night (bad timing, but then, we had more notice of the party than of my surgery), and I spent most of it in the kitchen making batch after batch of vegan vodka jelly shots. Something to do with my hands, something to keep me out of the backyard mass of smokers, a way to connect with people that didn't involve awkward and repeated explanations about how I am.

There's a lot of people I haven't gotten back to, and I'm sorry. There's a lot of plans I've broken, and I'm sorry about that too. My concentration span is nil and my attention is flighty as hell. I'm going to the hospital in a few minutes, dressed as though for a job interview, and I appreciate the messages of support but I'm not going to be very good about responding to them for a while.

Have an irrelevant picture of a cat. We are colour-coordinated.

2008-11-19T17:34:00.004+11:00

I want to articulate what's going on but there are too many feelings to consider, too much politics to it all, it's easier to just update my gardening journal, pretend that I can find (enough) value as the sum of the things I make & the things I grow.

This gets to me more and more. As though what should be positive, productive parts of my life have become places to hide. I can't face my house, so I sit in my room and crochet. I can't face that friend, so I cancel plans and spend the time in my garden. I can't find confidence in intimacy or self-revelation so I limit conversation to news-bulletins about the state of my plants.

On the one hand, I really am interested. I'm fucking fascinated, and the flood of enthusiasm is genuine (so genuine that I feel like a freak, a performing monkey, an adorable, irrelevant eccentric with an adorable but essentially irrelevant passion). But I can't pretend that it's not also a place to hide.

"Why would you think that anyone would be interested in what you have to say?", that's something someone who pretended to have my best interests at heart used to say to me. "Can't you see that they're not interested, that they're waiting for you to shut up?" I've put a lot of work into excavating the damage that words like that did to me, but there's always a small part of me that wonders if she was right. I have ever been the over-enthusiastic one, the one who communicates loud and fierce about everything. The one who cringes and fears the condescension of: "It's so cute how into this you are".

I'm not so great at the moment. I've been scheduled for surgery (finally), which terrifies me, and I don't feel close to any of the people who could make this easier for me. I can't take the gentle, genuine offers of assistance, I can't ask for what I need or accept it when it's offered. I feel like I'm occupying a multi-layered prison, with my coldness and deliberate distance at the outer edge and my passions in the cage closest to my skin. My heart pounds in fear when I pick up the phone to call the hospital to confirm one of a thousand tiny details, and when I sleep I have nightmares about the cold, crawling poison of general anaesthesia. I think about talking to someone about it and it's so hard to even imagine. I cry, and ignore the people closest to me, and loathe myself for being unable to do what I need to do to look after myself.

Things I Have Recently Made

2008-11-13T22:25:00.005+11:00

A Truly Historic Moment

2008-11-06T01:30:00.002+11:00

Let it be known, on the great record of history, that on this day (Wednesday, November 5th, 2008) I rode my bicycle to the pub and home again. Without injury to myself, my bike, passers-by or inanimate objects, this great mission was achieved, marking a true leap forward in the acquiring of the skill of bicycle-riding by your humble narrator.

The journey to this point has not been easy, no it has not, fraught with slipped bicycle chains, false starts, grimy hands and sudden, slightly undignified dismounts, but to have gotten here at all is an enormous surprise given my complete and stubborn refusal to learn to ride a bike as a child. Perseverance in the face of the fear of looking stupid: that is what got me here, and I am grateful to it.

Now that I can ride my bike to the pub, all that is left is for me to learn how to ride my bike in a skirt, and then truly, nothing can stop me.

it's red in the middle

2008-10-15T00:52:00.005+11:00

I spent the week out far away where it's red and dusty and suck-your-moisture-out dry. In a huge old farm house with red in all the cracks of the floorboards from a recent dust storm. With a pretty dog and a lovely boi and a small but adventurous gang, exploring as far as we could in an enormous yellow truck.

The only time I've spent in the desert before has been on protests, because the desert is where Australia stashes it's dirty secrets (the first time I went to the desert was to break refugees out of a razor-wire prison on a barren plain). But it's also full of this other life, rich and beautiful, and this was my first experience of the desert as a living place.

There are beautiful things in Broken Hill, and beautiful people. I spent a lot of time thinking about creation, creative people, creative space (a studio full of red dust and beautiful paintings and the decades of the artist's life). About the way I cling to the coast and this solid, reassuring river of people that flows from north to south but rarely west, about isolation and distance.

I had piercings done that made me cry, made tears spill over as easily and naturally as when I was pierced with hooks for the pull when I was in America. Shook with fear and leaned back into strength and bit my lip and kept going (somehow). It wasn't the number or size of the needles so much as their unknownness, being submissive and bound and simply taking what was coming, rather than pre-negotiating (and counting, as I usually do, my way through each one- impossible when you have no idea how many are coming). I cried when I thought they were done and instead the big, fat, heavy ones came out, and the ones already in were lifted and the big ones shoved through beneath them, a slow and grinding push and tear and splitting of flesh. I don't cry for pain (pain makes me scream, and perhaps attempt to run and hide), but for invasion and penetration and the outside becoming inside. And when the needles are removed, the inside becoming suddenly outside as blood spurts, more than I am prepared for, abundant and startlingly red.

Sweet Candy

2008-10-01T00:34:00.005+10:00

The show went well. Sugar-sweet & high camp, with a few requisite fuck-ups that everyone in the audience swore they didn't notice. We did Iggy Pop's Candy, which was like revisiting my Shirley Temple Good Ship Lollypop character a few decades later, with a hint of dark & bitter to go with all the sugar.

The photo above was taken out later on Oxford St, wearing a good deal more clothing than I wore onstage but with the same wig & eyelashes. You can see the line of grubby spirit gum across my chest where raspberry candies were glued for the show- those glue marks were all over my body til I scrubbed them off with nail-polish remover.

The card deck we were launching looks amazing. If you can get your hands on the 52 Pick-Up Truck-Stop Playing Cards, do it. It makes me so proud to be part of a community that produces these things. My card is 3 of Spades, me doing butch, grubby hands, hard-hat and workboots, with two gorgeous diner waitresses. "Told you I can do butch", I said, trying to look convincingly tough in a sparkly pink wig and suspender belt.

On Monday I rode my bike all the way to Sydney Park, a good 2.5km from home, which is by far my biggest bicycle outing to date. The freedom of it is amazing, and to be so early in the process of learning is quite wonderful: every hour I spend doing it, my skill level rises so far beyond what it was when that hour began. A steep learning curve can be a beautiful thing, I am discovering.This is my bike, fixed up by me. Isn't she pretty, all out and adventuring in the world?

Someone Else Entirely

2008-09-25T01:07:00.002+10:00

I've been working with a friend to put together a show for this Saturday night, for the launch of the 52 Pick-Up truckstop playing cards at the Red Rattler. I haven't done a show onstage in over a year now. I wrote this to my friend when I was thinking about it at work today:

It's a bit funny- I haven't performed onstage in so so long, and the last stage persona I had was such a sweet little pop & bounce thing, it's a challenge to be pulling out this vampy grown-up character opposite a big king, masculine partner. It's fun but strange. Rehearsing is weird. I've been feeling silent and antisocial lately and it's odd to take off my gardening boots and put on stripper heels, rehearse these movements in that headspace. I'm enjoying the strangeness of it all. Also, I've lately been feeling a lot less 'decoratively femme' than usual, so assembling this decoratively femme character to go onstage is a lot more deliberate, less created out of playfulness and personal desire. I'm not rehearsing to be 'me plus stage volume', I'm rehearsing to be someone else entirely.

I had to write a blurb for a photo of me that's on a playing card today, as well, and had sent through to me a link to an academic article (PDF) I was interviewed for two or more years ago. It's been a funny day of seeing myself through other people's eyes, through the media I am represented in. I feel a bit off about it all, itchy and unconvinced. I'm sure it'll pass.

Still life with silverbeet

2008-09-22T01:15:00.002+10:00

Sometimes I look at things like the small mountain of silverbeet I harvested today and think I can't believe I grew all that food. I can't really take credit for the mandarins, since I've not had much to do with the tree (although I've noticed it's flowering since I fertilised it), but that silverbeet is all me. Well, me and the genetic determination of plants to live.

I am filthy and exhausted after a day of constructing, re-arranging, transplanting. Bed-building, hole-digging, compost-churning, re-planting, tree-climbing (twigs and spiders in my hair from an adventure up the mandarin tree). I've been in a distinctly off mood all weekend, and the day out in the yard helps. It doesn't solve the problems, but it gives me something more interesting and constructive to think about.

Carrots, spiders & poetry

2008-09-19T00:54:00.005+10:00

A few weeks ago, it might have been some silly early hour of some morning, I was on the front doorstep of my house with a girl across my lap, spanking her in time with another friend, and we were singing: "And we won't stop until somebody calls the cops, and even then we'll start again and just pretend that nothing ever happened". Like it was a protest chant, an anthem for the early hours and those kinds of adventures. I like to imagine that the original artist wouldn't have minded at all.

Tonight three of us were on the porch having our last drinks before bed, talking a mile-a-minute to fit in all the things we always need to tell each other, when we heard someone walking by. One by one our heads popped over the balcony railing and the woman below, glasses-wearing, older, kinda hot, said: "Oh! There's three of you! I shall have to serenade you". So she walked back the way she'd come and strolled by again, singing a song to the three girls she'd found on that balcony above her. "We LOVE YOU!" we told her, and she told us she loved us too.

I pulled a handful of carrots out of my garden today, full-sized real-sized carrot-sized carrots. I was so proud. We ate them with dinner, and posed like bunny rabbits (which you always have to do with carrots still wearing their leaves). I did two hours of karate tonight and every time I was told: Mokuso (eyes closed), I closed my eyes and pushed my limbs through the air and in my minds eye I saw the seedlings in my garden pushing themselves up through the crust of the dirt, reaching with their incredible strength towards the sun.

On my way to bed I found this spider hanging out with the poetry on the wall, waving his legs & trying to look much bigger than he really is. I wanted to pat him (the silky-soft fur of huntsmen spiders is so velvety and touchable-looking), but the arachnophobic housemate asked me not to.

Magic light

2008-09-15T02:36:00.003+10:00

We have been worshiping warmth with bare arms and no coats, lifting our faces sky-wards with joy. "It feels like it's been winter forever", said my housemate, and she's right. Last summer we never even got the chance to put our winter coats away, never more than a few days of warmth between bland chill and grey skies, so this heat is a rare gift.

I lay on the trampoline last night underneath the almost-full moon and cried and cried, wrapped up and safe between housemates. People react so differently to sadness than they do to anger (and anger is always my first response when I am hurt: hiss, spit, claws, venom). Two full moons ago my world fell into a dark, angry black hole, a highly pressurized little isolation field constructed around myself to be angry and destructive in, but entirely cut off from anyone I could have hurt with my anger (my friends stood unseen outside the black hole, shouting to be let in, trying to tell me that cutting them off hurt more than raging at them). On the last full moon I was back at a shaky equilibrium, cruising forward but with that wound still raw and bleeding and real, still wounded-animal-alone. Last night I really cried for it, for the first time I think, found it in me to be sad instead of angry. Sad and resigned and mourning, with a publicly-accessible grief for special things long gone.

I find it so difficult to trust that there would be someone there for me if I lost it, so I hold it in and convert grief to rage and use the fuel of that rage to push myself onwards, to keep going & keep coping & keep living. I am hard-shelled and inaccessible in my rage and hurt. It was so alien to let people hold me last night, to be soft, to admit need. I realized that I'd forgotten how to be sad among friends.

And today is getting on with things in warm wind beneath a full moon, beginning to believe in spring and the wild, unrestrained growth of things. I sat watching movies with my laptop in my lap, exclaiming: "If I don't obsessively document my garden, something dreadful will happen!". I went over to fix a friend's computer with dirt under my nails and seed packets in my pockets. It is spring, and I have things to do.

Eat your greens

2008-09-13T00:24:00.002+10:00

And your reds, pinks, oranges and purples, too.

I forget that if you get your food only from the grocery store, that silverbeet only comes in one form: green with a white stem. I forget that there is one kind of a summer squash variety called a 'zucchini', and that it's dark green and cylindrical. I forget that tomatoes are always red, carrots are always orange, beans are always green and potatoes are always white on the inside.

My fluoro-coloured silverbeet, green, yellow, black and purple tomatoes, seven varieties of zucchini and button squash (green, white, bright yellow), purple beans and purple carrots and purple potatoes make so much more sense to me. Finding little pieces of flamingo-pink silverbeet stem in my silverbeet & lentil pie tonight made me smile.

My Delightful Contradictions

2008-09-08T02:08:00.002+10:00

I came home from an all-nighter in the clubs (highlight: discussing gender theory with a lovely woman on the side of the dance floor while receiving a lap dance from a very cute stable-boi) to a few hours sleep, then up, then cooked breakfast, then out into the garden. I filled a new bed with compost, found newly germinated potatoes and tomatoes (pride!), sprayed a biological caterpillar control over my brassica crops. Then wound up chatting to my over-the-fence neighbours who wound up coming over to help me chop down a few feral trees, weeds springing up and growing strong in places where they were guaranteed to cause problems. We were at it for a few hours, sawing and chopping and lifting and carrying. I sent them home with an armful of fresh coriander for their troubles.

I came inside, muddy-handed, ran into housemates and a visitor. We went to the park with the dog for the evening, ran into more friends there (so randomly, walking through), made even more friends who came down off their balcony to join us. We played guitar, sang songs and danced in the grass, laughing and free and full of joy. Came home when it started raining to find the rest of our household and wound up the night in squealing silly delight, singing full voice to the pub rock hits of the 80s and engaging in questionable housemate boundary-crossing. Percussion-play with leeks and herb harvestings made the kitchen smell amazing, there was wax, and I got to bring out my prize flogger to christen it from the top-side.

I have retired now to a room full of half-finished crochet projects and the smell of armfuls of jasmine I've got arrayed in teacups on my shelves. I can still hear giggling and activity downstairs. "I want to come to ALL your housemeetings!" squealed one lucky guest, high on it all. It pushes and challenges me, yes it does, but this life, right now, is so right for me. Crochet and trashiness, dance-floor debauchery and domestic bliss, responsibility and wild possibilities realized. There is no other way I'd rather be doing 25.

Internet memory

2008-09-05T13:20:00.002+10:00

Whoa. Last time I ordered a book off Amazon, I lived on Ashbury St in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, CA. I lived in a wood-paneled dining room with curtains on the glass doors, on a street so beautifully decrepit it made my heart ache. I dated a 50 year old body builder from Santa Cruz, met my friend for mimosas on a Sunday morning down the hill in the Castro, went out dancing at hip-hop clubs all night because the white dykes of San Francisco so rarely seemed to dance.

I was this strange Aussie rebel who insisted on keeping actual cow's milk around because the idea of putting 'fat free half and half' in my tea was so revolting. And tea. Oh. I caught busses across the entire city to find the Trader Joe's that sold tea that tasted like anything I would consent to drink.

I learned how to cook plantains and black beans. I knew vegans who were allergic to soy and wheat, who lived on nothing but plantains and sweet potatoes and almond milk. I learned to cook for them too.

The books I was buying were original editions of Doing It For Daddy and The Leather Daddy And The Femme.

That all came back to me just then, one jumbled moment of sense-memory. I am tracking down a copy of the (hushed, reverent tones please) Harmony Guide To 300 Crochet Stitches, Volume 6, and the accompanying volume, the Harmony Guide to 220 More Crochet Stitches, and thus: my first foray into internet book shopping in three years. My tastes- well, they may have shifted a little.

A perfect, tiny gift

2008-09-02T00:37:00.002+10:00

I was hauling plants around the garden, re-arranging the many pots which had to be shifted when arborists came recently to hack down some huge weed trees (thus opening up the whole fence line for new garden beds, hurrah!). I picked up my big planter of strawberries, admiring the perfect little new leaves they're putting up through the thick winter mulch, thinking: Oh I can't wait for these to flower, I will be so excited when that day comes.

And then I looked down closer and nearly dropped the whole planter in consternation, because there, tiny and round and perfect, hidden among the fresh green leaves, was this flower. On the first day of spring. Perfect.

Oh I was so excited I was leaping around and yelling (once the planter was safely positioned in it's new home). It was a spectacle, and I couldn't find anyone nearby to get excited with me, but I didn't even care. I have been beaming all evening about this first flower.

Like Magic

2008-09-01T11:24:00.004+10:00

Those are lettuce seedlings, germinated beneath up-turned salad punnets, reaching up towards the sunlight. Four types of lettuce there, although mostly 'Purple Oak Leaf' which has done really for me so far.

The garden grows, it does, and today is the first day of spring and I can see sunlight and hope flooding in. I mostly journal my gardening adventures over at MyFolia these days, so if you miss my gardening entries I might suggest heading over there to see what I've been up to. I suggest this journal for a cautionary tale in why compost bins need to be actively managed. Slop-heap style and 'hoping for the best' is pretty much doomed to fail.

Blood, tea, electricity, percussion, polish.

2008-08-31T05:24:00.003+10:00

It started with blood and tea, with a three-tiered cake stand and proper vintage tea cups, lacy handkerchiefs and sugar-cubes flowering red with drops of blood. We were corseted and frocked up, giggling and squealing and well-mannered delight. I thought: fuck I love my friends, and all their creative perversion. Every time I thought that the limit on how to pervert a tea-party had been reached, I was proven wrong, and the surprises kept coming.

Then there was electricity, the violet wand, ropes to hold me down and screams of exhilaration.

And then percussion, stripped down bare, two fierce tops, an array of floggers, and a squirming little me tied up to the frame. We finally christened the flogger I won at the Leather Pride spoken word a few months ago (I love it, I do, it's as effective as it is beautiful), and we did so much more.

And finally there were boots, and polish, warm by the heater as the energy simmered down, as we emerged from our small world and realized the party had died around us. Gathered our things and came home through the rain for a cup of tea and a farewell chat.

I haven't had a play party night like this in so long, stripping off my outfit for bed and trying to figure out where, exactly, each of the marks on my bodies might come from. Which implement, which wielder, which moment. It was amazing, and amazing to get to explore so very many of the things I love all in the space of one night. So many levels and so many different energies but not at all overwhelming. Ah. I loved it. Chilling out now with the rain outside, thinking that my seedlings probably appreciate the drink, thinking that I am such a lucky girl. That I will get up tomorrow morning to do the gardening, and feel and find hints in every movement of what I was up to the night before.

Craft brag: squid fascinator

2008-08-30T20:13:00.002+10:00

I have discovered the joys of enamel paints, allowing me to turn all those daggy-coloured but awesome plastic kids toys I find around the place into lovely chromed, or gleaming black, or speed-striped awesomeness. Behold the chrome squid fascinator! The bobby pins aren't ideal, but I don't have time to attach this contraption to a proper comb before I head tonight.

On some of the plastics I was painting, the paint didn't seem to want to dry, but an application of hard-core theatrical make-up sealant seems to have hardened it off.

Recipes: (Nearly) Vegan Guinness Pie & Mini Gluten-Free Cheesecakes

2008-08-30T02:21:00.003+10:00

I have been baking, yes I have! Don't have any photos to display but I am recording these recipes here for future reference. The first one, (nearly) vegan Guinness pies I made for my household for dinner tonight, is entirely of my own devising. The second, for mini gluten free cheesecakes, is a combination of a bunch of recipes I found in various places.

Hmmm. It seems that Guinness is on the list of beers that conscientious vegans don't consume, but, well, apparently the vegans I live with are less concerned with the possible presence of animal by-products in their beer filtration than they are with tasty tasty pies. If there is good dark vegan stout out there, I'm sure it will substitute just as well.

(Nearly) Vegan Guinness Pie:
Ingredients:

Splash of vegetable oil
One big onion or two small ones, diced
3 cloves of garlic, smooshed small
Five soy veggie steaks (I used the 'peppercorn soy steaks' from Vegan's Choice on King St)
A bunch of mushrooms, diced (maybe half a bag-full?).
1/2 C flour
3/4 can Guinness
2 bay leaves
1 tsp beef-style vego stock powder, or similar
Splash of red wine
4 sheets of puff-pastry, thawed.

Method:
Turn the oven on to 180C.

In a medium saucepan, saute the onions over a low-ish heat in the vegetable oil til they're getting transparent, then throw the garlic in, cook for a bit, add the flour, stir that right in and let it cook for about a minute, then pour the Guinness in and stir well. Add the bay leaves & stock powder. Employ a handy housemate to keep stirring that while you're busy with the other pan.

In the other pan, fry up the veggie steaks til they're golden-brown on both sides, and sautee the mushrooms til they're dark and pretty well cooked.

Pull the veggie steaks out onto a chopping board and dice them, then add steak-chunks and mushrooms to the gravy. The gravy should be nice and thick by now. Add your splash of red wine for some colour, and give it a few more stirs.

I did these pastie style, but you can encase the filling in the pastry however you choose. Here's my method: cut each sheet of pastry into 4 squares, put a tablespoon full of filling into the centre of each square, grab all four corners of the square and pinch them together in the middle, then pinch the pastry down the sides to seal. Lay the pastries on baking sheets lined with baking paper, pop in the oven for about 25 minutes, or til golden brown all over.

Eat. We greatly enjoyed these with mashed potato and a lovely salad on the side.

Mini Gluten-free Cheesecakes
Gluten-free base:

1/2C gluten-free flour
1/2C dessicated coconut
2T brown sugar
3T finely chopped pecans & walnuts
2T melted butter

Combine all the ingredients then press into patty-case linings on a cupcake tray. Don't make the bases too thick or you'll run out of room for the rest of your cakes. About 3-4mm is good, or a teaspoon squished in flat.

Bake at 180C for about 15 minutes, then pull out and cool (but leave the oven on).

Cheesecake:

2 packets cream cheese, room temperature
1/2C raw sugar
2 eggs

Using electric mixers, beat the sugar and eggs til it's lightened in colour and gotten thicker. Then add the cream cheese in cubes and keep beating til smooth. This can take a while. Have patience.

Add a teaspoon full of cheesecake mix into each patty-case (which will already have a biscuit base in it). Try to get each blob of cheesecake as smooth as possible.

Pop back into the oven for 20 minutes, or til some of them are going a little golden around the edges.

The big finale:I finished mine off with a top layer of lemon & passionfruit curd that I brought back with me from the farm. Hmm. It's beyond the scope of this post to tell you how to make that, so perhaps go look it up, or use commercial lemon curd, or devise your own lovely goopy topping, or just enjoy your cheesecakes how they are.

I made these in very tiny cupcake trays, half normal cupcake width, and they're just about perfect.

Static

2008-08-27T16:49:00.004+10:00

The Saturday before last was my third karate grading, promoting to advanced blue belt. I was exhausted, ambivalent about being there at all, and it was fucking hard work to pull out over two hours of focused energy in that state. I did it, and was proud of myself for doing it.

But I wasn't well, and slid almost immediately afterward into a hole that it's taken me nearly two weeks to begin to climb out of. I didn't go back to karate til last night (a nine day gap, far longer than any others since I started). Could barely make it to work. Felt as though every channel in my brain was switched to static, anxious and jumpy. Unable to sleep then unable to get out of bed in the morning. Barely present in conversation. Suddenly the many projects I've somehow accumulated (most of which I'm generally excited and motivated about) became a monstrous, monolithic heap of Work, of obligation, looming and terrifying. I felt broken, felt the inevitability of imminent failure in all my endeavours.

One of the things that happens to me when I slide that way is that my sleeping patterns become insanely fucked, which of course exacerbates the problem. I become close to nocturnal, with my brain awake and firing (nothing useful, just full of all the things I'm failing to do at any given moment) from midnight to five am, leaving me lethargic and shitty the next day. I sleep the day away and then hate myself for the wasted time that I didn't spend doing all those THINGS I NEED TO DO (which I am so anxious about doing I can't even begin to approach them). I miss out on sunlight, on human contact, on the rhythms and patterns of daily life. Become more isolated, more alienated, more insular. Feel so horrified at the state I'm in that when I see people I lie about what I've been doing, then feel beyond wretched for lying. Begin to drown in a sense of crisis and failure as time passes, work does not get done, obligations are not met, and the static intensifies.

But it was only one week. And I force myself to hold back on condemning too harshly that lost week. For one thing, hating myself for failing to function on occasion doesn't help me to function better. For another thing, I have a lot on. I am doing more with every waking moment than I ever have in my life. I am so proud of myself for everything I'm doing right now, and have to remember that I haven't always been like this. I have shied away from opportunities in the past because I was so scared of the obligations that might come along with them. That I am stumbling occasionally as I learn to juggle this incredibly full life- the one where I work full time, do contract work on the side, take on multiple creative projects, manage and maintain an incredibly high-maintenance household, keep a garden, cook food from scratch, write articles, don't even take the time I'm on the bus to stare blankly out the window because even those few minutes must be productively spent crocheting- well, it's not really such a surprise, is it? Whether I wind up toning down my commitments a little, or find a way to keep this load up, I am learning still. When you're learning, it's OK to fuck up sometimes. And apparently my stupid Capricorn work ethic means that no matter how much I fuck up on occasion, I will still meet my obligations and get the work done.

When I made it back to karate last night, having missed the big promotion ceremony for all the graded students, they called me to the front alone. Gave me the black stripe that signifies my new rank (7 kyu). The senpei and I bowed to each other, then I bowed to the other senpei, then turned and bowed to the rest of the students. They applauded, and I beamed.

The hang-over to the static is that my bodyclock is still beyond fucked, and it's taking discipline and exhaustion to haul myself back to a business-hours (work all day, karate in the evening, home to work on projects for the night) schedule. It's a battle between bodyclock and will. The getting up in the morning thing is going OK, but the getting to sleep at night bit needs work, so I'm not getting anything like enough sleep. I'm doing this all without the aid of coffee, because giving up coffee has been such a point of pride for me this year. This means I am probably even less human in the mornings these days than I usually am. I apologize if you have to encounter me before midday, ever.

Hauling

2008-08-25T18:23:00.002+10:00

The (seemingly) endless project of clearing the spaces of this enormous, history-infested house continues. I spent today hauling crap out from the side of the house, where the entire little lane between building & fence had been filled with the detritus of good intentions past. We hauled rotting chair frames, eskies, a huge "ESPRIT" light box, bird cages, branches, heavy plywood boards, rotting planks, plant pots, doors, glass window panes and more.

And finally, right up the very farthest reaches, when we'd been going for hours, we found these: an entire unit of beautifully stenciled soldiers, more than 8 feet tall each (for scale, that's a fridge you can see on the right-hand side of the photo). 15 at least (I didn't really count), resting on their sides, all in amazingly good condition. They'll have been there since shortly after the outbreak of the Iraq war, left behind after a Reclaim The Streets or an anti-war protest or a fundraising gig. They're quite amazing, really beautiful in person, but what are we gonna do with them? I certainly don't want to decorate my backyard with enormous US soldiers- bad vibes. So out into the laneway they went, hoping for a random scavenger to find them and offer them new life somewhere.

The work is getting us somewhere, bit by little bit. I walked into my backyard today and smiled- a backyard free of scattered junk & rubbish is an amazing thing to behold. Each part of this house that we reclaim, clear out, consolidate is a territorial win for us against the weight of the history of the place. Making it our place, our home, full only of the things that we want and love. There is something so incredibly depressing about the way my eyes slide over and past mountains of rubbish, junk, rotted intentions, that colonize all over this huge property. It's as though this junk, or the intentions of the people who put it there years ago and then forgot about it, is more important than we are, the women who live here. To clear it out is to declare ourselves the real inhabitants of this space. It's magic.

For all the tea in my backyard

2008-08-23T15:50:00.003+10:00

I am sipping happily away at a cup of hot green tea, brewed (like all true teas) from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant. I offered a sip to my housemate and she cautiously opined that it tasted a little, hmm, fresh- maybe like- um, a bit like grass? Of course I think it tastes perfect- in fact I suspect it may be the best tea that has ever existed- because it comes from the leaves of my very own tea plant!

I've been wanting one ever since I figured out what they were. I love my herb tea garden (struggling as it is at the moment) but what attempt at some sort of urban self-sufficiency would be complete without real tea? Research had led me to believe that the plants were tricky to acquire, needing to be grown from seed (a lengthy process) or by cutting (good luck finding someone nearby willing to offer one!), and once acquired, tricky to look after, and once grown, tricky to produce tea from. So I'd sort of resigned myself to it being A Project, something I'd search eBay for when I had the time, then spend hours and hours fussing and fretting over (fussing and fretting over garden projects is one of my favourite things to do. More rewarding than fussing and fretting over my sex life, anyway).

Then the other day I met my parents for dinner and my mum casually dropped a bag down next to me, shrugged, said, "We didn't really like the tea it made". Opened the bag and there, in full, dark-glossy-green glory, was a Camellia sinensis, a good 30cm tall, healthy and robust looking. I'm not sure either of my parents fully comprehended why I was as excited as I was, but I've been skittering around this plant in my garden for two weeks now, all coy-like, too excited to even go near the thing.

But my mum (being a camellia gardener of many years experience) told me it needed a good cut back before spring, so I pruned it back, and the leaves I pruned have been sitting on the table awaiting being made into tea. I'm sure I'll get more into the complexities of tea-making in the not-too-distant future, but actually all I did was rinse the leaves, put them in the microwave for 40 seconds, pull them out, crush them up between my fingers, drop them in a cup, pour boiling water over, leave for about a minute then strain into another cup. And that made a perfectly palatable green tea ("grass-like" said my housemate, pfft. I liked it!).

I can sense that I will have to do some research into the caffeine content of the leaves at various stages of growth, because right now I'm buzzing more than I have since I gave up drinking coffee. My god. A pretty, glossy little plant that can give you a caffeine high, fresh, organic, right off the tree? I am in love.

Three weeks shy of Spring

2008-08-17T01:04:00.003+10:00

I spent so much money at the garden shop today. Stocking up in a big way. I so rarely get to make it out to where these things are sold that when the opportunity comes up I tend to go a little wild.

I bought:

One 'compost aerator', like a large wire corkscrew, to continue the ongoing effort of rescuing and rehabilitating the previously-tragic original compost bin in this house. The top foot or so is now happy, thriving, worm-filled loveliness, but digging below that is still a hazardous exercise. Hopefully the compost aerator will spread the joy downwards.
Four litres of Seasol. This stuff plus worm juice is plantmagic.
A few metres of plastic trellising to run up the fences for my snow peas (which currently wave and weave in the wind, unsupported).
Citrus fertiliser for the mandarin tree (heavy with bright, sweet fruit) and the lemon tree (swelling with hundreds of fruit clusters, still dark green but certainly growing).
Standard thyme, lemon thyme, marjoram, bay: herbs I have long been in need of (my thymes all died in the big travel/move drama of late and I've been wanting a bay tree forever. It's still a tree if it's 3 inches high, right?)
Four heirloom tomato seedlings, FAR TOO EARLY. What am I thinking? It's not even spring yet! The poor things are doomed! But I couldn't resist- just couldn't- so I'll pot them up a size tomorrow and build them little greenhouses out of sawn-off juice bottles, see if that carries them through to warm weather.
Leeks. Why? Why did I buy leeks? They're tiny slender little things that will take ages, or so I am led to believe, to grow to any decent size. But impulse ruled, and now I have them, and will find a spot for them somewhere in the yard.
Endless amounts of seed-starting mix and potting mix for all the many many seeds it's now-or-almost time to begin.
A huge tray of impatiens, easy soft colour for all our shady corners.

There is no amazing lovely garden here. There is a dank expanse of deep shade, enormous and chaotic and full of junk & dogshit. I've eked myself out some beds against the fence (broad beans & silverbeet going well, snow peas tendrilling in every direction) and have big plans to build brick walls around the only patch of sun in the very centre of the yard, fill it with compost, grow tomatoes there.

Still think I'd move for a full-sun backyard, but I might be able do something with this.

Horizonshift

2008-08-14T18:51:00.002+10:00

Sometimes my world is so big, expands so far, a spiraling complex universe of connections and relationships. Sometimes that terrifies me, seems to demand more of me than I can give, makes me crave what is close and easy and small. Sometimes it lights me up with inspiration, with energy and sparkle, with endless possibility and the tightrope-walker's conviction in never falling.

Sometimes my world is tiny, limited to a few faces, a few names, a very few places to go. Sometimes this smallness is a sweet and necessary hibernation, a time-out and renewal. Sometimes it is a cold and lonely isolation, locked-in and claustrophobic, filled with the terror of being truly alone.

I stumble and hesitate and can't quite get the words out. Leave pauses too long in conversations with old friends, people I should know well, but am acutely aware of the gulfs between us.

I tell bright and enlivening stories to strangers, twist myself and every tragedy of my life into a punchline. Grit my teeth and lift my chin and shine resolutely.

I think what I am trying to talk about is scale, and scope, and distance. How far from my face I am able to focus at any given time, with any degree of coherence. How much I ever trust this intense & creative world around me, and how much I ever trust myself to be able to put back out into it what it deserves.

V. infernalis

2008-08-08T19:31:00.002+10:00

I don't really have a policy about publishing my complete stories here, but I don't do it very often. I just sent this off to the lovely ladies at Slit dyke sex magazine, though, and thought it might be nice to share.

Work is copyright me, do not copy or repost without permission.

Warning: strange porn follows, look away if you're underage, of weak constitution, or related to me.

I met her in front of the cuttlefish tank of the aquarium, alone one rainy Sunday. She was lost in staring into the round, dark eyes of the creatures beyond the glass, and the rapid rippling dorsal fins like the fluttering of eyelashes. Her eyes reflected icy blue in the dark glass of the tank, taking the measure of the mollusk within. It regarded her in return, exhaling regularly with rippling membranes. I watched them both, hungry for the mysterious soft-bodied strength of them.

She stepped away and to the next tank and I followed. “Oh, I love feeding time” she breathed, and could only have been talking to herself or me. Together we watched an octopus, fast as liquid lightning, devour the small fish dropped in by gloved hands. I took a chance and replied- “The way they move is something else, isn’t it?”

She stared at me with the same cold stare she’d been exchanging with the octopus and for a long moment I thought she’d shuffle away, that I’d scared her off, but she smiled instead and licked her lips with a quick, glistening tongue. “Yes”, she whispered, and her gaze dropped down to my lips, my collar-bone, my hands. I’d picked up in stranger places than the aquarium before, so we skipped the rest of the displays and headed home in a silence as heavy as the weight of the ocean.

Her apartment was dim, the light low and cold. She kissed me hard against the door, teeth-clashing and lip-bruising, grabbed my hands and wrapped them firmly around her small waist. Her muscles were a mystery beneath my fingers, her joints too loose as she pushed herself into my touch and twisted, dropping limp as a ragdoll to the floor and pulling me with her.

Her skin was cold and lovely and she whispered encouragement more sweetly the further I explored. Her legs parted on a sigh and my hand, seeking higher, found only cool, naked skin beneath her skirt. She watched with those luminous eyes as I parted the lips of her cunt and found briny wetness and intricate folds, which seemed to unfold and unfurl as I traced them. My fingers were in past a knuckle, then another, and her teeth flashed white as she smiled at my progress.

You could get lost in here, I thought, attempting to navigate this strange anatomy that still swallowed me up, past my final knuckles and over my hand, and still I hadn’t found my way past her outer lips.

I began to panic, to wonder if I’d ever so much as find her clit, when I traced past something firm and budding against my fingers and she shuddered, gave a breathy moan. “Oh, again-“ she whispered so I did it again, tracing gently, and around my hand her flesh grew wetter, seemed to extend itself, to be reaching past my wrist now. Hers was like no cunt I’d ever felt, and she must have sensed my hesitation because my hand was gripped tight, now, enveloped in pulsing muscle which slid with boa constrictor strength around my fist. I was just about preparing to freak out when she pushed herself up on her hands, stared at me with those eyes, brighter than anything else in that dim room, shook sticky hair back from her face.

“Don’t stop- please, don’t stop” she said, and the folds that held my hand immobile rippled gently, encouraging me to keep stroking her there. Her face was flushed and desperate, pleading with me, so I leant forward, kissed her, kept going. Her folds parted again around my hand as I stroked her, allowed me to move at my own pace. “In- in- please” she murmured, and tilted her hips up so that my fingers found her entrance. I slid in and found my fingers swallowed by tight muscle lined with hard, smooth ridges. I pulled back to stare at her and she kept her eyes on me, nodded, urged me on. I pulled out, thrusted again, felt those hard ridges slide and rearrange around me as I fucked her. Teeth, I realized, the thought floating distantly through my head- I was fucking her, and my fingers were sliding past teeth on every thrust, tight cylindrical rows of them, curving upwards and away from my hand.

It was hard to think it was a big deal in this room that stank now of sea-salt and sex, sweat beading down my face, a girl moaning and hissing beneath me, with my arm enfolded to the elbow in the slick, moving folds of her cunt. Her head was thrown back, her mouth stretched in a grimace, her breath coming in little shouts, and then a silent, arching scream. I toppled forward as her entire cunt clamped itself around me, bone-crushingly tight, for three agonizing pulses. Her legs slipped tight around my back to hold me there and her cunt felt like it was devouring everything beneath my shoulder, and then with a final shudder and a great flood of wetness I was released.

She lay quiet and still, breathing shallowly. I eased myself back a little, and found that we were kneeling in a spreading puddle of something that glowed exactly as pale and blue as her eyes. It soaked her crumpled skirt and the knees of my jeans, spattered my t-shirt, and I thought I saw some of it splashed across the wall nearby. Between her slender legs I saw the long, sinuous folds of her cunt begin to wrap themselves up again, as neat and contained as you please, so I slid my hand out of her and was not surprised by a few fine, shallow gashes on my fingers. I bent and pressed a kiss to her thigh, one to her hipbone, one to her cheek. Stroked her hair and waited for her to come round.

Process and production

2008-08-04T17:31:00.003+10:00

I've been working on a curly, swirly green silk-alpaca blend scarf. It's like an enormous curlicue flourish. I fuss over it anxiously, not sure if this is the right yarn for the right pattern, not sure if the person it's for will like or wear it, but it's still so much fun to make it, to chain together these shapes and see how they fall, fluttery little snippets of a very classic lace pattern.

I woke up this morning and had a bath outside (the shadows had shifted so that the sunlight was on my toes only but I sat on a garden bench afterwards, towel-clad, and dried off in the sun). The bath has a huge jasmine vine growing over the plumbing and it's in full, fragrant bloom- the smell is amazing. The stocky, furrowed-brow dogs came to check in on me while I was in there, attempted to help out by giving my upper body a tongue bath (thanks, dogs!).

Every tree is heavy with citrus fruit, the nights are cold but these days are warm and beautiful. The chickens and ducks are laying so fast it's impossible to keep up with all those eggs (6 eggs in an amazing chocolate date torte last night, 6 eggs in lemon passionfruit curd this afternoon, eggs for breakfast, eggs for lunch, plans for creme caramel after dinner tonight...). Liters and liters of milk come out of the cow every morning, a river to deal with- make butter, make cheese, make custard, make dairy delights of every conceivable arrangement. The chemistry of working with the raw materials is so fascinating (cream + the application of force= butter, surprisingly quickly).

Process and tangible result is so good for my head right now. Following finicky, fussy recipes or crochet instructions and enjoying the result- projects that begin, have a process, then end with a product in hand (or mouth). The endless process and lack of result at home (in my house, at my job, in my social world) is driving me mad. A vacation of small, achievable results is perfect.

Conversing

2008-08-03T10:02:00.003+10:00

I sometimes fear coming across as smug or a bit holier-than-thou when I bubble over with excitement about the things I love doing, which just happen to at many points overlap with the great imaginary list of Approved Activities For The Righteous In The First Decade Of The 21st Century. Craft? Check. Gardening? Check? Wholefoods, rawfoods, tracking down the fresh and local? Check. Curb-shopping, dumpster-diving, resource-conserving? Check.

"What did you do this weekend?"

"Well, I did two hours of sport Saturday morning, then spent the afternoon crocheting in the park with some friends, cooked dinner from some vegetables I rescued from going to the dump, went down to the local organic markets Sunday morning, caught the bus home and re-organized my garden beds for spring planting. You?"

(Once I learn to ride my bike competently I can change that last line to "rode my bike home" and REALLY rock the smug aware urbanite attitude).

I also don't watch television. At all. Not because I think it will pollute me somehow, not because I think I'm above it, but because I find the sensory experience of it to be like sandpaper to my brain. The pure sound-and-movement input is too extreme, too intense, and I have no room in my brain to cope with it. I sometimes feel like I am lacking the necessary modern ability to filter or shut myself off from the content of high-impact media forms: my body cringes away from physical or verbal violence on a screen as though it were happening to me, and my brain replays the most horrific moments on an endless feedback loop until distraction is found.

My ability to separate myself from what I'm watching has deteriorated significantly as I've gotten older (I remember being able to watch television without trouble as a teenager). I wonder sometimes if this has to do with things like assaults on streets, with protesting and the violence of cops, with seeing and handling real human misery, separated by razor-wire rather than a screen (and sometimes not even by that). If real-world context makes it that much harder to dissociate from the imagined-created form.

It's not even just violence, though. Advertising, news programs, acclaimed dramas, comedy shows, films universally acknowledges as 'amazing': I can't handle any of them without squirming in real, physical discomfort.

I don't feel like this makes me a better person, I feel like it makes me a less functional inhabitant of the world I live in.

Fortunately for my ability to interact with the world around me, there is this pull-media form called the Internet, where information is gained more as a conversation than a pre-programmed channel. And when my brain needs to be switched off, disengaged, not making decisions or acquiring information, well, that's what crochet is for. Hours of rhythmic, repetitive movement, minus any overwhelming input of sound and colour, are soothing beyond measure. Just another coping mechanism, really.