catch28

The Universe is a bastard.

Last night my mum and I were talking about my grandmother’s 80th birthday party coming up in a week and a half. Specifically we were talking about my cousin, who has muscular dystrophy, and how he was determined to come over from adelaide for it, even though it was the middle of winter and he’d caught pnemonia twice last year. We worked out this morning that he died at about the same time we were talking about him. His heart failed as he was brushing his teeth getting ready for bed last night.

The universe is a bastard. 

There’s, like, three things going on in my life at the moment that are cause of heaps of running around, with hardly any satisfaction.

Moving house is dragging on and on, and is eating most of my weekends. Saturday was spent at the old place cleaning and getting the place ready to be shown to gulible members of the public willing to pay $320 for a place that was barely worth the $290 we were paying. Keys are handed back on tuesday morning, which means I’ll be late for work, and then we’ll have to go through the rigmarole of getting our bond back. I like the new place, but its difficult to get used to,

Work is incredibly frustrating. I injured my wrist over two months ago and still have recurring pain. Which means I can’t do my job properly, and have to do heaps of running around to get enough evidence of my injury and ongoing problems to satisfy Comcare. Not to mention that I’m on a "graduated return to work plan" which plays hell with my roster and often leaves managers running around to office trying to find me and ask why I’m not on the phones. And I’m supposed to get this new equipment which is taking forever to arrive, and I have to chase up everything to do with it. Last friday when I spoke to my Occupational Therapist about it all I almost broke down crying on the phone from the sheer frustration of it all, even though I learned a long time ago that crying at work is just not a good look on me. And yes, I know its a shit job, but I’d rather be able to do it than not. And I could really just go on and on about every little detail of it, but it shits me to tears.

On top of that I have to get a new security clearence, which would be really helpful with the whole "career" thing, but the fuckin thing is so frickin involved, and I have to provide evidence of everywhere I’ve lived in the past 5 years, which appearently is 7 different places, and do you know how hard it to provide evidence of a place you’ve lived that you moved out of because your flatmate became a raving drug addict? And I’ve got to do this by friday.

And my mum told me yesterday that my 5 month old nephew, fresh out of hospital after having an E.Coli infection, will most likely have to have surgery on his skull in a month’s time as two of the plates in his skull have fused together and left untreated it can cause brain damage as his brain tries to grow.

So yeah, apart from that, everything’s fine.

You know, one good thing I’ve learnt at this job, is how to just separate parts of my life and not think of them unless they’re right in front of me. I mean, the work stuff doesn’t really bother me unless I’m actually at work. But it’s like the issues are bleeding into each other. My wrist problem, which is mainly something to worry about at work, but it totally affecting the rest of my life. And the house moving stuff is just eating into work, with trying to find the time to do everything, not just taking time off to go do things like hand our keys back, but how to find the time to do things like call the phone company and wait on hold for 20 minutes when every minute of my day is rostered. I just feel so incredibly time poor. I don’t have the time to go to three different doctors. I can’t really afford to have time off to deal with house stuff. There is no time at all to go see my nephew, or go stay at my parent’s house and help out my mum since she hurt her back (which I’m totally taking advantage of instead, by keeping her car, which is saving my life at the moment in that it’s allowing me to get things done, but leaves me with a big pile of the catholic guilt thing). Oh, and I’m feeling incredibly lonely as well, because I’ve been too busy to make time for my friends so they’ve all made other plans, and our new place is further from everything, and my flatmate is taking every opportunity to go spend time with her girlfriend cuz she’s also dealing with similar crisises of crap.

My new best friend is Fbi, the radio station, who has been providing me with hours of company when there is no one else around.

My nephew needing surgery is totally scaring the shit out of me. In my head I keep thinking "It’s not brain surgery, it’s skull surgery, but christ it’s close," and "fuck, he’s just a baby, fuck." fuck.

fuck. fuck. fuck. 

Kiki & Herb are performing in the Studio at the Opera house October 27 - November 10!!!!

YouTube - Kiki & Herb - You’re Ugly

You simply must watch this clip. 

I’ve had reason to think about my stuff recently. I mean my actual stuff, the objects I surround myself with. Partly this has been prompted by the fact I have to move and I gotta pack it all up, but partly also because of a boy I met, who was actually interested in my stuff, or, more accurately, the stories of my stuff.

And that, I finally figured out, is what I like about my stuff. I can point to each object and tell a story. And its not that I like to surround myself with material objects, but I like to wrap myself in the stories they tell, the things I can say about them, and what they say about me. I think thats a big motivation for what I do in my life, to create new stories. I do this purely for myself, so I’m always suprised when others find my stories interesting, as he did.

I gave him a wristband I made. "It’s a story," I told him. "You’ll go back to america, and you’ll wear it out somewhere, and someone will comment on it. And you’ll tell them this story about how you went to Australia, and you met this boy and even though you’d only known him a few hours, he gave you this wristband he’d made himself, just so you could tell this story."

Later, he drew a picture for me, inspired by the water stain on my ceiling. I said I’d put it on my wall, because I always put the art people make for me on my walls, and I’d be able to point to it and say to people, "I met this boy from america, and he came to my house, and I gave him a wristband I’d made to take back with him on his travels, and in return he drew me this picture."

Some art for some craft, and stories for both of us.

I’ve been thinking about tajines a lot lately. Two specific thoughts actually.

The first is kind of like the sort of thing you might see in a sketch show. Basically the premise is that a bunch of people are standing around talking and another person runs up to them, interupting and yelling "tajine!!!" and pointing to the ground off-camera. Then the camera pulls back, widening the shot to reveal a tajine sitting on the ground. I find this idea hilarious.

The second idea is to write a short story about a little boy and his adventures with his pet tajine. and yes, an actual tajine, not an animal named tajine. I think it would be a great story, if only I could find some plot to go with my characterization.

You may have heard the news that soon I shall be moving to a new living space. This, I believe, is none too soon, as the downstairs neighbour constantly plays the same track as he practices his dj skills, of which he has very few. This is the same track he has been playing since we moved in, more than a year ago.  Occasionally he’d play a different track, but the we’d have to listen as he tried unsuccessfully to mix the first track into the second. After a few weeks he’d invariably abandon the second track, and continue repetatively playing the first. The thing that does my head in now though, is that he’s recently acquired a microphonce to go with whatever equipment he has already, so now we have to listen to his girlfriend obnoxiously sing off key over the same repetative track he’s been playing for the past year. Tonight she was singing about "representin’ the new microphone." Oh dear, I must get out.