Making :: headway in my inbox, one of the biggest stresses I have at work.
Cooking :: is something I still loathe but have accepted I need to start doing for the health of my body and, as an incentive, wallet.
Drinking :: more than I usually would during the week because parts of life have been a pretty rough for the last few weeks.
Reading :: a lot, probably more than I have since high school, even though I’ve been a pretty dedicated reader since then. I’m just hungry for the written word this year and I’ve noticed other things drop off, like listening to music or watching movies.
Wanting :: more than my wallet will allow right now.
Looking :: like death warmed up. I think the way I look reflects my stress levels generally, so I’ve been a not-so-hot mess.
Playing :: ‘Eyepennies’ by Sparklehorse and PJ Harvey, my favourite song and the first song I’ve been able to play through on guitar pretty much the first time after seeing it written out!
Deciding :: to get my health sorted out properly.
Wasting :: time. Always wasting time.
Wishing :: I had a view of sunsets and storms from my lounge room.
Enjoying :: Tumblr. I was really late to the game on that one, but now it’s my happy place.
Waiting :: for the next phase of living in Sydney to begin.
Liking :: my House of Cards marathons with Anna von Splat!
Wondering :: how the first season of True Detective will end.
Loving :: B.
Pondering :: how stupid it would be to get a loan to spend another month in America next year.
Considering :: moving to the ‘burbs.
Watching :: True Detective because I haven’t seen anything as brilliant on television for a long time.
Hoping :: to be able to give a dog a home by the end of the year.
Marvelling :: at where I am compared to where I’ve been before.
Needing :: several good nights of sleep.
Smelling :: like Juliette Has a Gun’s Lady Vengeance, my favourite perfume.
Wearing :: all black for tonight’s NIN/QOTSA gig with Steph!
Following :: the snarky commentary of fellow geeks waiting on their Pebble Steels.
Noticing :: the change in seasons.
Knowing :: that giraffes can only fight for a short amount of time or they faint.
Thinking :: about how excited I am about hanging out with Steph tonight because we’ve seen both NIN and QOTSA together and tonight we will see them play on the same bill!
Feeling :: pretty drained which could be thyroid or stress.
Admiring :: all the new members of my family in all their loveliness.
Sorting :: through things I no longer want to keep.
Buying :: my winter wardrobe.
Getting :: a new role at work in a month or so.
Disliking :: how much people get off on being angry.
Opening :: a savings account for Japan!
Feeling :: long overdue for a road trip.
Snacking :: and logging it all in my app for my dietician, boo!
Coveting :: houses with backyards and dogs needing adopting!
Hearing :: Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love album because it has ‘Tougher Than The Rest’ and ‘Brilliant Disguise’ on it and I love both songs so much, plus the cover is badass.

I loved this t-shirt from the moment I saw it, hanging in the window of a shop on King Street, which along with this solitary pro-gay t-shirt, sells legal herbal highs and incense. Typically I have no time for such stores, my incense needs are catered for by Fiji Markets, but I needed some cheering up yesterday as I walked home in the pouring rain.

I wore it to work today, with some navy cotton pants and my favourite red lipstick, because goddamn it was an effort to get out of bed this morning. I’m trying to make an effort not to look how I feel because I feel like a ball of pyjamas that haven’t been washed in weeks.

Somehow that desire equated to this.

I get ocular migraines all the time, maybe two or three times a month and have never been able to pinpoint why or what triggers them.

Once I went to an optometrist on Crown Street to see if there was a problem with my vision that might be causing them. The optometrist put drops in my eyes to expand the pupils and found nothing of interest, leaving me to stumble back to work down Cleveland Street, tears streaming from my poor dilated eyes, passers-by assuming I was one of the local meth-heads.

I spoke to my GP about them, earnestly explaining that when I felt one coming, I tended also to have an intense craving for Minties, which he put down to a crash in blood sugar levels that often precedes a migraine. For a long time I saw Minties as the solution to my migraines, except that two weeks ago I’m pretty sure eating Minties caused a migraine. Nothing is sacred.

The first time I had one, I was about 15 and working after school and on weekends at Best & Less in Orange. It was the beginning of my time there and I was still too young to relate to my manager as a peer, plus he’s recently called me a wench, which I knew from a recent English class on Shakespeare, just mean ‘woman’ but I wasn’t sure that he know that, and suspected he thought it was an insult. I’d also been recently accosted at the registers by a strange new workmate who wanted to know when I’d first seen a dead body. Also I’d caught a woman shoplifting and after eyeballing me while letting the plastic wrapped shirts she’d stuffed under her clothes slide to the floor, she’d followed me around the store singing Nine Inch Nail’s infamous ‘Closer’. Piece of advice right here: that is one hell of a way to ensure a scared 15-year-old will not call the police.

Anyway, when I started feeling car sick and the vision in my right eye started strobing, I didn’t feel like I could ask to go home, so instead I lay on the dusty blue carpet of the lingerie department, surrounded by cheap, synthetic bras, hung on thin plastic coat hangers which were forever getting tangled when women rifled through them to find their size.

I lay there and I thought I was dying and I thought to myself, ‘This is not how I thought it would end!’. Keeping in mind I was 15 and living in Orange, I had grand hopes of one day maybe dating one of the guys from a local band, Bongrot and finding the perfect mix of cheap vodka and lemon squash. I had all that to live for, I couldn’t die there on the floor. Plus I’d never seen the carpet vacuumed so it was maybe not the best place to lie.

In summary: I now know that my vision comes back after an hour or so, but I will feel car sick until I’ve has some sleep and I still don’t know what causes them or how they get triggered, but an ocular migraine will not kill me and ‘wench’ just means woman.

This:

Plus this:

Plus this:

Plus this:

in 18 months = really fried hair.

I think my hairdresser may not have been kidding this time when she said leave it alone or it’ll fall out. Now is definitely not the time to reminisce fondly about having purple hair.

Twitter has been horrible in the past few days, have you noticed?

It made me reassess how I’ll use it, or whether I still want to use it at all. I feel like it’s come to a point where you have to firmly plant your stake in the ground and it needs to be way over here or way over there and if you’re not over here you’re a misogynist or an apologist of the most horrendous magnitude, or blind to patriarchy, or maybe just plain unintelligent and so rather than feeling like I can say, “But I’m somewhere here … about a foot away from you but suddenly it feels like asking any questions or expressing any reluctance to join you on this one issue is going to lead to all kinds of trouble …”, I’ve said nothing.

It’s been really frustrating, questioning whether not wanting to go balls to the wall makes me a bad person but I think I’ve come to the conclusion my life has built me a moral compass and I know when I follow it and when I don’t and mostly I follow it and mostly it makes me an okay human being and I like to know as many sides of any argument as there is to know, but not in an atmosphere where I feel like that alone is enough to have me labelled as something I’m not.

I don’t need to advertise where I stand right now in my life, but it would be nice to feel like I could if I wanted to.

The noise of his assault, not just her screams, were so loud I could hear it through their front door.

I was standing on the footpath outside their house - my dinner with my boyfriend and housemate had been interrupted a few minutes earlier by the sound of an argument, the tone of which made us all uneasy –  and it took only seconds to realise how serious the situation was.

I ran home and my housemate called ’000′, the three of us returned outside, where a small group of people, all on their phones calling for help, had gathered.

The assault continued, mere metres from where we stood.

A small window above the front door was open a crack, and I suppose, thinking things could escalate further before the police arrived, I yelled for him to stop, told him we’d called the police.

The front door opened and there was a woman on the floor, a man standing over her and as she crouched there he began trying to kick her onto the porch while she clutched at his legs.

He wanted her out of his house, she wanted to collect her phone and bag.

Having recently finished Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear I understand now that intuition works faster than the process of logic and so I suppose I had enough time to see he wasn’t carrying a weapon, he was middle-aged, furious and violent but not in any way a threat to me - there were so many neighbours gathered, several of them much younger men, so I didn’t feel at risk - so at almost the same instant my boyfriend and I both started to move into the house.

I understand why one female neighbour screamed at us not to go in, I don’t know that I would have had the situation not presented itself exactly as it did and I don’t know I would do the same if it happened tomorrow, but that night we did.

The man retreated to the lounge room at the end of the hallway and sat there, my boyfriend keeping an eye on him while I went into the front bedroom with the woman and helped her collect her bag, wallet and phone. As we left, she held my hand and she was cold and in shock, limping badly and holding her stomach.

We took her home and waited for the police.

When they arrived, we went out the front to give them the space to interview her and there we watched them load her partner into a van, handcuffed and angry, he had apparently been verbally abusive to the police when they arrived and they’d had him on the footpath and removed his belt and shoes.

An ambulance arrived and paramedics were directed to our lounge room.

Here’s what I learnt that night:

Paramedics don’t know the exact location of shelters for victims of violence, only the police do, but at that time of night there’s barely a chance of finding a bed, most fill up in the afternoon. There are not enough beds in Sydney for all the people who need safety from violence. There are far too few.

A large number of women return to abusive partners and we were cautioned that we should expect that outcome and that the paramedics and police would support her if she wished to press charges, but would refrain from passing judgement if she wished to return home.

The best chance of safety that night was admitting her to hospital and alerting hospital staff that her partner was to be kept away from her. If she wished to return home after being assessed at the hospital, the police would bring her back and make sure the house was safe for her to re-enter.

Here are conclusions I made that night:

A call out to a domestic violence incident that ended without serious injury seemed to be one of the better results the police had experienced. For all the criticisms of the police in this country, some of them well-founded, I don’t have to face what they do in my day-to-day life, or have to play a role in judging it. I have no idea how they do it, the mental strain must be phenomenal and the fact that our society is so violent and that the assault that night could not be classified as the worst of what they had seen says as much about Australian culture as much as it does the police force, laws and funding for victims.

***

A removalist arrived several days after the assault and arrest, presumably to move the victim’s belonging out. I haven’t seen her since, nor have we received any information about whether or not she pressed charges, or if it will go to court, though we all made it clear we were willing to be witnesses.

Two days after the assault I was leaving for work and there he was, on his front porch watering his plants. I had no choice but to walk past him and we made eye contact. I have no idea if he recognised me or not, but nothing was said.

I’ve seen him several times since, he’s still living two doors down.

The young women who lived in the house between us moved in the weeks after it happened. It would not surprise me at all if what they heard that night was the driving force behind the decision, I avoid walking past his front door where possible.

The media and politicians seem to be gripping to recent unprovoked attacks on young men by young men because there’s a common theme, a punch that seems unprovoked and happens suddenly. You can legislate (problematically) against that, because there’s a common theme that ties the incidents all together.

Domestic violence is far more frequent (and occurring increasingly) but it takes on so many different forms, it can happen behind closed doors beyond CCTV or witnesses, victims are often financially and emotionally dependent on the perpetrators and the abuse can build up slowly over time and be more insidious.

Regardless of the complexities, one fact remains: we live in a country where a man backing his partner into a corner and beating her with his fists and attempting to literally kick her out of their home is a level of violence both common and not amongst the most serious seen in domestic situations. That that is the norm is disgusting and frightening. Hospital beds should be for healing, not for protection and police officers and paramedics shouldn’t see so much violence that they have to counsel people to give up hope that victims can get the support they need to leave violent situations.

But that is the norm.

That’s the country we’re living in right now and I’ve given it a lot of thought and I have no idea how we change it.

Last night I went to my hairdresser, H.

She started doing my hair in 2006, when she was a 16-year-old. Now she’s submitting plans to her local council to start building a house and I am still changing my hair colour from blonde to dark all the time.

I was very scared to see her because she had spent many hours getting my hair blonde last year and I decided to dye it brown again because I am having some kind of lady crisis and short of shaving my head, dying it is the most drastic thing I can do.

All the hairdressers crowded around and rolled their eyes at my decision and H looked at my 18-foot long re-growth and said, ‘Uh … have you been avoiding me?’ and I admitted that yes, I had been avoiding her, her and her well kept, perfectly blonde follicles and judgemental ways.

The head hairdresser said, ‘Julia, we’ve done this before and I need you to know something: if you go dark tonight, that’s it, no more blonde for a very long time, your hair will fall out.’.

I felt like telling her how often my mother has told me that I was born with a lovely round head and that I would probably look very good bald. Then I remembered that I was also born with a giant red birthmark on my head. And that in 2001 I cut all my own hair off and it grew back into a mullet which took years to fix.

I flung my plastic cape over my lap and told them I was aware of the risks and was prepared to go over to the dark side and I sat there smugly looking through the Instagram feed of Kyle Sandiland’s ex-wife while they prepared the dye. Life choices: I was making them.

It only took a few hours and I was a brunette and as H dried off my hair she sighed, disappointed and said, ‘Brown does look good on you.’. I had to agree, it’s no more natural than blonde, but I feel like me again.