Resistance is useless

Image: BBC

When I was young, Doctor Who was on the ABC every weeknight before the news. I loved it, but like so many other children, it scared the bejesus out of me. I probably saw more of the palms of my hands than the television screen and, yes, I did resort to the cliché of hiding behind the couch. Looking at the hyper-realistic costumes above it is clear why I would have been so terrified!

My segue here is fear. Fear and the bizarre effect it can have on us.

This week has been enormous. On the weekend I realised that a recent Australian interest rate cut meant that renting my house was a viable Plan B if it didn't sell in the near future. Ergo: I no longer have to wait for the house to sell before moving to Canada. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I booked my flights. Today I resigned from my job. The really fun part was finding a flight that allows for a stopover in Tokyo. The hardest part was pressing the button to commit to buying the first flight; I must have sat there for nearly ten minutes, aware that that one action would push me past the point of no return. On the flipside I know from bitter experience that an international flight can increase by hundreds of dollars in the course of a couple of hours, so I was also nervous that if I didn't commit this week - that day - I'd lose the one reasonably priced combination I'd been able to find for the month-long window of departure dates I'd been searching. Up until then all the one way flight connections I'd seen were more than my entire return ticket to Montréal in February.

Yet there I was, a woman with a fully formed, timed and costed-out plan and a husband to get to, hesitating. A whole new, exciting world of experiences and opportunities lies before me, with a gorgeous man to lie beside me, and yet the chatter in my brain, the resistance to letting go of my current life, the sheer physical difficulty in pressing-the-goddam-button-already, was astounding. I was paralysed with fear in the face of enormous change, despite the fact that the change is something I want so very badly. In the end, obviously, I gave myself a mental slap across the face, came to, and just pressed the bloody button!

Today I drove into work knowing that, again, an irrevocable action was about to take place. I feel a deep sense of loyalty to my organisation and I love my co-workers dearly, I feel bad about leaving them at a difficult time in the face of sector funding cuts and a tough art market. Telling my boss, in fact, was nowhere near as bad as telling my co-workers, even though we've all known this day would come for quite a while. Still, I had heart palpitations when I made an office-wide announcement.

But why? Why, with the prospect of moving to a major international city full of art and culture and good food, and where they speak both French and English, to be with the man you love, could there ever be a hesitation? I get to reboot my life completely, transferring across only those files I choose (though no doubt there'll be a few lurking Trojans!) Every time I get a heart pang at the thought of leaving my house, every time I fear that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life, every time I see a Ulysses butterfly and wonder if that will be the last one I ever see, should and will be a time to get excited about all the new things that are to come and that could never happen here, will never happen if I stay. I won't be too hard on myself if I catch myself grieving, but I will reprimand myself if I find I am getting resentful of the reasons Charles can't come back here, or if I am clinging too hard to things that are ultimately of lesser importance – tin foil and pipe cleaners all of it, just like the costumes in the image above. Because resistance to change, fear of change, can make you hide behind the couch even when you are a grown up.


P.S. Unlike a number of my friends, I haven't been able to get into the latest incarnations of Doctor Who and its offshoots. I haven't watched a full episode since the fifth Doctor.

The agonisings of an unrequited love

Dear Mavis Blue,

I am so sorry. I thought we'd be together for a very long time. In fact, I thought at one point that I might grow old with you. But life has a funny way of taking unexpected turns, and mine will soon take me a long way away from you. And you, being so set in your ways, cannot follow.

There are still so many things I would have liked to do with you: install a rainwater tank, more plantings in your garden, polishing all your floorboards afresh, replacing your remaining original ceilings, doing more about the Wet Season drainage. And there are things about you, too, that scare me: the eventual yet inevitable restumping and the re-laying of your concrete slab, what to do with the enormous Cuban Royal palm in the garden that all the neighbours want cut down but that I love like a crazy person.

In the end I choose my husband over you, as I choose him over all other things in my life. Within that choice though, I must decide whether I keep some connection with you, stringing you along, kidding us both that we may one day be reunited, or that I cut that string, freeing you up to meet someone new who will love you and care for you as I will not be able to do from the other side of the world.

Of all the ties I cut, yours will be the hardest - I am a Cancerian through and through. But it must be done, and for that I am sorry.  

I will miss you.
Beverley


This week I have been in a housework frenzy. I have a co-worker house-sitting for me while I go away next month and the tentative start to the Wet Season has seen blossoms of mould bursting forth on the ceilings, walls and architraves of my 75 year-old Queenslander like so many rose buds in spring. It's a Tropics thing, we get used to it. Kind of. I've been up close and personal with the interior with bleach, spray bottle and bucket in hand, making things nice for visitors again, and while I've been labouring I've had time to contemplate just what exactly I am going to do with this house when I move to Canada sometime later this year.

I've owned this home for a little over four years. It is my first foray into real estate. Buying my own home was something I had wanted for years, almost a decade. I was so proud of my achievement when I bought her, and also crazy shit-scared! I bought her in 2008 when the magnitude of the GFC was just beginning to become apparent here. The previous owner only had her as an investment property and just wanted to get rid of her quickly so he could buy something else. I joked at the time that I stole a house, I had paid much less than was common at that time. Unfortunately, Cairns real estate not only stagnated, its value has gone backwards over the last few years. Agents make valiant claims of a comeback soon, but I know in my heart that if I sold her now I would only get about the amount she was valued at in late 2010 and I have spent $14,000 on a new bathroom since.

I also know I am never coming back to Cairns. Even when (if?) I return to Australia, I will not be coming back here. I will be heading down south, closer to my family and most of my friends. My dilemma, obviously, is whether to keep the house or sell her. While a couple of friends have their hand up to move in, I couldn't charge in rent the full amount of my weekly mortgage repayments. That in itself is scary since I don't know when I will start working once I get to Canada. But even now, when I live with her and love her on a daily basis, there are times when I find myself petulantly resenting the sacrifices I have to make to service my mortgage. Some days it feels like entrapment. When I crunch the numbers, as I am doing with increasing frequency, all maths points to selling and accepting actually making a loss when I consider how much I have spent on renovations and mortgage repayments. Further losses may result otherwise. There are only two things that count against that: the gambler's eternal optimism that the market will improve in the next few years, and total, unmitigated sentiment. The trouble is, I love this house. Oops!

My stepmother, always a beacon of rationality in any financial storm, once sagely counselled: "Never fall in love with your house." So, Reason, where are you? I need you on this one. But Mavis Blue just has her charms, and few seem immune to them. She feels like a holiday house. Every day. She is private, and breezy, has pretty light, and French doors, and just the right amount of charmingly flaking paint (if you are into that sort of thing). And she is the most magnificent shade of blue. It is immediately calming. Every time I think of selling her I feel a wrenching in my heart.

Charles and I will sit down together while I am in Montréal and run the sums again and talk about what is and isn't possible. From 16,000km away it will be easier to make a rational decision.

I should have listened to my stepmother.

Cheese: the meaning of life?

 

 There's not much in life that can't be resolved by eating cheese with a spoon!

Life's all been a bit big lately: after a few days off post-flinging myself down the stairs, I headed to my hometown, Adelaide, 3,400 kms away, for my grandfather's memorial. My brothers came over from Melbourne, several relatives came over from Port Hedland in Western Australia, it was surprisingly huge in many senses of the word. What I found particularly fascinating was the difference between my memory of Grandpa and the memories of some of my cousins. I am the eldest grandchild, followed closely by my first brother, and when we were growing up in the '70s Grandpa still worked. After us there is a gap of between eight and 17 years for my cousins and my youngest brother, and it seems Grandpa in his retirement was a much mellower man than the one I remember.

While in Adelaide, I got to spend some good, quality time with my family, got rip roaringly drunk on Frangelico with my youngest brother (my hangover felt more sugar- than alcohol-induced - ugh!), did the rounds of the Adelaide Central Market where I wished I could have bought the entire Gorgonzola pictured above, met my new baby nephew, and stocked up big time for my Etsy shop. I found some really great pieces that I am very excited about - coming soon! 

By sheer coincidence, there was a 25 year school reunion on the Friday night I was there. I wimped out because it was a long way from my Mum's house where I was staying that night, and by the time we got to the day of the wake I was so glad I hadn't gone - it would have been way too much emotion to tackle the reunion, which would have been the first I'd been to, and also see my grandma, who is suffering from dementia, and go to the wake all in the one weekend.

Grandma was a classic though. She was present when my grandfather died, but, naturally, her condition means she forgets this. Most of the time she forgets he's even gone. She suggested to my youngest brother and I that we should go and visit him in his room up the hallway in the nursing home, "But," she added, "He's not been very well lately. In fact, he's a bit useless these days!" Awkward!

If it ain't broke...

"Listen up.
The 'universe' DOES NOT CARE about you, okay?
It doesn't try and 'tell' you things or reward or punish you for anything.
It just doesn't give a F#$%! It can't! It's a universe... not your f#$%in' mamma. Alright?!
Thank you." - GDD, former housemate, now long-distance Facebook friend, Facebook post 2012, initials used to protect anonymity.


Every once in a while you get a moment to yourself to pause and reflect on the true nature of the Universe. For me that chance came a couple of days ago as I was rolling around in agony at the bottom of my back stairs.

I was having an incredibly productive day, of the type I haven't had since before my back went dicky. I'd just had my medical and X-rays for my permanent residency application to Canada, I'd had two sales on Etsy, and I'd finally gotten around to buying a new printer after hours of painstaking research. I'd even taken myself out for brunch at Caffiend and had their truly wonderful fetta and basil omelette. It was a benchmark day in my recovery. Life was good. 

I'd popped home to package up the Etsy sales and drop off the printer, then I'd planned to do a run to the post office, then the op shop to try to restock for Etsy, pick up the X-rays and deliver them to the GP, and then do a supermarket shop. Busy, busy, busy! As I headed out I stopped near the bottom of the back stairs to add one last thing to my shopping list on my phone, and then I stepped off... 

Except I wasn't on the bottom stair as I thought, was I? No, I was on the second or third, and I stepped off into the void and went crashing down, landing with a sickening crunch on my right ankle while my phone smashed face first into the concrete. As I lay there trying to breathe through the pain—watching my ankle imitate a tetchy puffer fish and running through the checklist of "Is it a sprained ankle, or a broken ankle?"—I contemplated that I may have been done in again by a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for. 

Now I'll confess that in my younger days I used to be a bit of a hippy-dippy, esoteric, New Agey thinker, but I got over that. Reason has won that contest, though on occasion Wonder still tries to put her two cents' worth in. I don't believe that 'everything happens for a reason'. In fact, that's a platitude guaranteed to send me into a boiling rage. But I have observed that sometimes if you really want something to happen, it does. Hence you have to be careful what you wish for.

I'm not advocating 'wishcraft' or any of that Law of Attraction hoo-doo, I'm far more inclined to think that wanting something to happen makes you much more receptive to noticing when it does, and probably also makes you act in subtle ways to bring it about. But what I'm taking an awfully long time to get to is that, in my experience, if you are really putting it out there that you want something to happen you had better be specific—like make, model and serial number of desire—because otherwise it tends to come back to you any which way and you must wryly concede that you got what you wished for, just maybe not quite under the most ideal of circumstances. I'm talking getting fired when you hate your job but you haven't yet got anything else lined up, that person you've been crushing on turning out to be a dick once you are dating them or else confessing their true feelings the minute you've given up and started seeing someone else, that sort of thing. In this particular instance I have been very strongly focusing on how I wish I could have several days to work from home because I have so much written material to generate and I'm getting interrupted every five minutes in the office and can't concentrate, and, as is well documented on this here blog, I am really not loving my Android phone and miss my iPhone, particularly since Bek introduced me to Camera+ the other day, which like Hipstamatic is not available for Android users. Amazingly, my phone still works, even though its screen looks like a spider's web.

So, here I am, proving that is is in fact possible to limp with both feet (gosh, I must get around to explaining about that left leg!), trying to keep my fat, sprained right ankle elevated, compressed and/or iced as much as possible and contemplating either a replacement phone screen or the purchase of a second new phone in the space of six months (aaaargh!).

Not-so-lucky duck

I know I really should be posting about my truly delightful wedding to my truly wonderful new husband, but this evening, now that I have a minute to write again, I am inspired by something a little sad.

You see, there was this duck...

There is a creek that runs down the centre of my street. A couple of weeks ago one of my neighbours asked in a Facebook message if I had seen the new duck that was hanging out in the creek. There are a lot of native waterbirds that forage along the grassy verge, but I hadn't seen a duck. I made a joke in reply about how lucky it was for the duck that I hadn't seen it, since those who know me know I am a pretty enthusiastic consumer of the little dears.

Then I saw it. It was huge! Seriously, its body was about the size of a goose, but it was definitely a black and white duck. It was not even a Muscovy, because, you know, those suckers get big. No, there was no red wattle or anything like that, just a very pretty, very big, black and white, domesticated duck.

I saw it a few times and wondered what its story was - how it came to be all alone in the big (pfft!) city. But, well, we were getting married that week and then we went off to Fitzroy Island with the kids for a few days afterwards and I forgot about it. Then, a couple of days after Charles and the kids had gone back to Canada, I was driving my beautiful bridesmaid, Morgan, to the airport at an ungodly hour of the morning. It was still dark when I got home and as I turned into the street I saw the duck by the creek in the headlights, awake and scared by the light and obviously feeling vulnerable. My heart went out to it and I knew at that moment that it had once felt safe in someone's yard and now it was trying to be a big brave duck and not doing so well at it. I resolved to try to adopt it.

I spent the next couple of days keeping an eye out for it, checking up and down the street, thinking maybe I could herd it into my well-fenced yard and then it would have plenty of safe spots to roost. I'd get it a kiddie pool, the cats would befriend it, I wouldn't cook any more duck at home, and we'd all live happily ever after. I told Charles about it in a Skype session and he laughed his head off at me: "A duck? 'Safe'? At your house?" Um, yes, well, I realise that, on paper, my house would have to be one of the least safe places for a duck to be, but I've never actually killed one myself. Anyway, I couldn't find the duck.

This evening I drove to a friend's house just on dark. Coming up to a T junction three blocks from home, by another creek and the local shopping centre, I saw some red clothing on the road, a t-shirt or something, and I swerved around it. As I stopped at the T a four-wheel drive to my right slowed down and swerved around what I assumed to be another bundle of clothes, black and white. "Hello", I thought. "Someone's lost half their back pack of clothes." As I turned into the road and drove past the lump I realised the lump had feathers. "What the hell? Did someone's chicken escape?", I wondered. Having seen the 4WD swerve I thought I would do the citizenly thing and go and move it off the road because things were going to get ugly real quick on a road as moderately busy as that one. I did a U-ey and went back and as I pulled up I actually said aloud, "Oh, no! It's the duck!" And it was. I just knew it was freshly dead, too, since it hadn't been squashed yet. I felt so sad for it. I got out and grabbed some things from the boot to roll it off the road with. There were three young 'lads' on the other side of the creek watching me: the kind of teenage boy that in this neighbourhood probably would have tried to rob me and steal my car if they'd been on my side of the creek. In my sadness I called out to them since they were clearly following the drama from a distance:
"Did you see it get hit?"
"Yeah."
"Did it just happen?"
"Yeah. What is it?"
"A duck."
"Oh..."
Followed, in my grief, by the life story of the duck as I knew it, told as I rolled it to the gutter. My parting words to the boys were:
"Pity, it'd probably be really yummy!"
"Are you gonna eat it?"
"(Sigh!) No!!!!"
Mind you, once they suggested it, I thought about it for a second and decided I probably couldn't bear to gut and pluck it. It's a sickness, I'm sure!

So there you have it. The sad demise of one scared duck that boy, oh, boy, don't I wish I'd been able to find earlier in the week now, or that I'd left the house 10 minutes earlier so I would have seen it wandering on the road and somehow managed to herd it to safety. Mind you, given the poor visibility and the speed people drive on that road it probably would have resulted in me lying on the ground with my insides spilling out a little instead. But, please, in light of this, spare a thought for all the lost, abandoned and wayward creatures in your town that might need some care and attention. The charities I choose to support are invariably animal-related: for some reason I am much more emotional about and empathetic towards dumb animals than sentient humans when I am asked to dig deep. I can't even begin to analyse how I can be sad for the death of one duck, yet happy to eat others.

PS This post is also a cover for the fact that my last grandfather died this week. I'm not really going to go there online, so let's just concentrate on the duck for now, shall we?