Category — Tales from the Dark Side

Haha! So. I haven’t written much about The Wuz lately, mostly because even thinking about her causes my blood pressure to rise to extremely high levels and I start feeling short of breath. I’ve been pondering her a lot regardless, like would she make a better fur hat or fur collar this winter, because I’m going to turn her into one or the other of she doesn’t stop ruining my entire life.

People often ask what kind of cat The Wuz is, sometimes they ask if she is actually a cat at all, mostly because her face looks like the back end of a fur-covered bus:

She’s an Exotic Shorthair, and it wasn’t until this week that I remembered one of the defining features of the Exotic Shorthair (besides the flat face and the need for company): they are late in maturing.

They sure are, if by maturing you mean not pooping in the dining room or destroying things with huge sentimental value.

Here is what happened: The Wuz is an indoors cat and when I moved, the bathroom in the new place proved harder to ventilate than the old place and so there was a litter situation that wasn’t very nice and was causing my housemate some angst. We switched to an enclosed litter tray, which scared The Wuz. Here is a list of some of the other things that scare The Wuz:

* People walking around with their pants around their ankles (fair enough too, this scares me as well);
* Vacuum cleaners;
* Mops;
* Cat biscuits falling from the sky;
* Small children, and
* My housemate breaking chocolate up by throwing it at the wall.

So rather than poop in a scary, scary box, she started pooping in the dining room and I started getting messages from my housemate about it.

Can you even imagine? My poor housemate is sensitive to smell, so the litter was bad enough, but poop in the dining room? Sweet baby cheeses.

Then it got worse.

How much worse?

A whole lot worse.

My cat (and I am referring to her through gritted teeth) ate one of my housemate’s pot plants.

And it wasn’t just any pot plant. It was a pot plant growing in a mixture of dirt and her grandmother’s ashes.

Can you even imagine? I nearly turned The Wuz into a hat on the spot. I was so mortified/horrified/frozenly apologetic. Then this morning she knocked another pot plant over. I am seriously, I can’t even, there are no words, I am just … all I can say to her is what Dad used to say to me all those years ago:

Wuz, I’m not angry, I’m very, very disappointed.

When I was a bit younger, I became very obsessed with evil media barons.

It began with Kerry Packer, after I read The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer: Uncut by Paul Barry. Emotionally absent fathers! Swearing! Heart attacks! Personal gaming rooms in Vegas! It had everything. I would daydream about going toe-to-toe with Packer, that his notorious temper wouldn’t scare me and that he would be so impressed with my debating skills that he would sit me on his knee and watch as I drank a snifter of brandy and laughed. And then he would laugh. And then James would look sad.

Then I moved onto Conrad Black, because let’s face it, how can you go past an evil media baron called Conrad Black. Best evil media baron name ever (if you ignore that his middle name is Moffat), plus, he was fortunate enough to be born with the rare combination of a strong brow that cast an intimidating shadow on the rest of his face, and plump lips that may or may not have provoked sexual thoughts in … a friend of mine. Yes. Additionally, Black is married to Barbara Amiel and Margaret Atwood fans will know the rumours that Zenia from The Robber Bride is apparently loosely based on Amiel! Squeal! It just gets juicer and juicer!

It was around this time I got outed as a baron obsessive, when Richard Siklos, then of The New York Times (Hi Richard!), found my old blog and wrote to me to suggest which edition of his biography of Conrad Black I might wish to buy. When I expressed concern that if he could find me, so too could Conrad Black, and maybe Conrad Black wouldn’t find my musings on his evilness and my idea for a line of breakfast cereals based on evil media barons particularly funny, Mr Siklos said, ‘Hi Julia, well, your secret is safe with me–and I’d wager that even if Black did see your post he might not be able to add you to the enemies list just now. Let me know if you have any trouble getting the book. If you become really obsessed with the subject, try to get your hands on the little-watched Canadian-UK made-for-TV movie Shades of Black …’ That’s because Conrad Black was going to jail. Yes, I was the last thing on Conrad’s mind.

Today all over the news is Australia’s own Gina Rinehart, making a move to increase her stake in Fairfax. As soon as I heard the news, my Evil Media Baron senses started to tingle and my heart had that feeling it gets on Christmas Eve, or after a few days of not taking my blood pressure medication. For the first time since I stopped being a media analyst, I bought a copy of The Australian Financial Review and there they all were, my good friends Neil Shoebridge, Alan Stokes, Tony Boyd, Sue Mitchell and Laura Tingle*

I will be keeping my eye on Rinehart, especially since The Sydney Morning Herald published Claire Martin’s picture of Rinehart throwing down the secret Evil Media Barons gang sign:

It’s a good time to be an evil media baron fan.

*None of these people are actual friends of mine, though they really do exist independent of that.

I like the idea of resolutions, except that I am notoriously bad at keeping them and notoriously dependant on time frames. No point starting a new routine on a Tuesday, when Sunday is the first day of a new week!

This year I decided to give myself January to think about what I wanted to achieve this year and I finally succumbed to the industry of motivational books with glossy covers with badly drop shadowed text and set myself achievable goals, rather than my usual ‘It’d be really rad to wake up and look like Daphne Guinness, minus the “I’ll eat when I’m dead” attitude!’. So yeah, my goal for the last two years has been to somehow wake up looking like a tiny, leather-clad Pepé Le Pew. I like to aim high.

I hate that the people who write those books are right. I’ve made an un-paid career out of mocking the earnest and overly Americanised tones of books like that. Their relentless velvet-gloved tough love reminds me of high school PE teachers. People like that hate people like me, it’s like every fit, self-motivated person received the memo that I wasn’t allowed to continue with PE in high school past a certain point because rather than doing gymnastics, I taught my friends to skank and sunbaked while having long discussion about the nature of the local music scene. Gym people look at me with a kind of sad sympathy, like they think I haven’t realised that a six-foot-something daydreamer is going to have massive co-ordination issues. Oh, I get it gym people, I got it the moment I managed to lose an iPod in a treadmill.

Yesterday I had a really interesting conversation about motivation and the areas in my life in which I have none. I always assumed that to change, or achieve goals, the idea has to be there, then the motivation and then the action and so I struggle taking action when there’s no motivation. I’d never considered that actually, the idea is there, then you start making moves to achieve it, and when you’ve taken a few steps and maybe seen some results, then the motivation comes. Thinking like that takes the pressure right off.

A few days ago I got an email in response to one I’d sent about my life post-uni and there was one line in it that really hit home: ‘I know everything seems like chaos right now – but I always felt excited by the possibilities of life when we were together’.

Suddenly I realised I don’t need to become anything, I just need to start being myself again. The myself who believed in myself (with lines like that, I’m practically qualified to write a motivational book), the myself circa 2005 who didn’t even know who The Honourable Daphne Diana Joan Suzannah Guinness was and my hair was black with a white streak not because of her, but because I told my hairdresser that I knew I could never have his white boy afro, but I’d be damned if I didn’t want her to make me look like I was going grey like Buzz Osborne of Mevins.

If you didn’t know me then, I was okay. I had great eyebrows and a penchant for typing up deep and meaningful song lyrics in Courier New and sticking them above my desk, for taking Polaroids of cherry blossoms at night and for the garb of Russian Orthodox priests. I did Honours in English for no reason other than that I deeply loved my supervisor and deeply loved how it felt to exercise my brain while struggling through books with titles like Philosophy in the Feminine. I was never lazy mentally or physically. I walked 6kms almost every day, I volunteered at a shambolically run art gallery and would starve myself all day so I could go to Pizza Hut and have the buffet and cry with laughter from the sugar high on the way home. I had crazy hair, sometimes it was flaming red, short at the back, long at the front and had patches shaved almost down to the skin and when the dye would fade, I looked like an oak tree in autumn. Sometimes I went to the pub in my pyjamas, sometimes I went in a fake moustached disguise. I had a strong self of self, no matter how inexplicable that self might have been. I cared less and grinned with excitement more and nothing around me now is different, the change is all in my head.

So a few people have been asking about my plans for the year, and they are, without specifics, to try very hard not to rest on my laurels and to remember that the shell changed, but whatever is inherently “me” never really did and all of this begins on February 1.

On Wednesday night I went to Porteño for the first time.

It’s sort of like The Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld. Porteño won’t seat your party until you’re all there, and if you’re late, they’ll cancel your booking. Getting eight adults from all over Sydney to the restaurant in Sydney’s torrential rain was an exercise of epic proportion and I showed up ridiculously early and looking like a drowned rat, so I went and hid in a seedy bar with some cheap bourbon.

When we eventually all made it to Porteño, any kind of stress anyone might have had about schlepping around Sydney and ruining  their best Jessica Simpson shoes disappeared as soon as the tequila-based cocktails arrived. I am not a food buff by any measure, so I’m not going to try and do the food justice, only to say I was happy to let Matt and Jamie do most of the ordering of the food and wine and each dish was amazing.

That I loved the Polenta a la Tabla wasn’t a huge surprise, but I have to say, I never expected to lust after a brussels sprouts dish, but their Repollitos de Brusela Frito is amazing.

I’m kinda keen to go back, maybe with the parental unit.

Afterwards we went upstairs to Gardel’s Bar where almost everyone else indulged in tequila and I sat thinking about how if I was wrong about brussels sprouts, maybe I’m wrong about everything else too, also, I can see almost all the way down my shirt, is it possible there is some lost brussels sprouts down there?

Australia Day was spent mooching away from the humidity, by which I mean Jeff played Skyrim and I played Scribblenauts.

Our conversations go a little like this:

Him: Argh! I am going to cut you dragon. I am going to cut you!
Me: Hmmm. I’ve run out of farm animals to use. Oh come on, you have to be kidding me! A Komodo Dragon is a legitimate farm animal!
Him: Lydia! Get out of my way! Carry my things! Why are you carrying too many of my things! I will poison you with Dwarven arrow poison!
Me: Oh gross. I just used a blow torch on a rat and it turned into a shish kebab and the chef ate it.

This weekend Jeff and pretty much every other male I know are in Tamworth for a buck’s weekend to coincide with the Country Music Festival which I think is a great idea, I always loved being in Tamworth around festival time. We’ll never hear about it though, they’re all on a Twitter/Facebook etc blackout (though just quietly, someone broke embargo and sent me a message that said: Already proven my manliness on this trip by knowing the lyrics to ‘I Should Be So Lucky’).

I’m on-call most of the weekend, but I have a hot lady date with Mush to drink gin and vodka and watch the third Paradise Lost documentary on Saturday and I am looking forward to it mushly (see what I did there? I took an incorrectly spelt word and made it even worse by making it a play on Mush’s name!) because we know how to party hard!

Hope everyone has a most rad weekend!

On the weekend, my nephew V turned two.

Which also means it’s been two years since I had a panic attack so large that my mum was all, ‘Are you okay?’ and I was all, ‘Lucky we’re on the way to the hospital already, because I think I might be having a heart attack’. Turns out I wasn’t and after visiting the baby, who has been cute since hours after birth, I had a very nice chicken and cashew nut stir-fry, which I’m pretty sure you can’t do post-heart attack.

This is one of the first photos I took of V, when he was just a few days old and I’d just realised it’s possible to love a complete stranger:

Now Vincent is about five-foot tall and can say all our names and ‘wombat’ and ‘yo!’ and is a total camera whore. I’m not sure that his grandparents are going to love me calling him a whore, but it’s been hard to take them seriously since they started being called GG and Duffy.

Mum and Dad rented a place on the Central Coast and we all met up there and had a little party for V in the only way my family can, by which I mean Mum cut herself snipping ribbon for the balloons so the balloons had blood on them and then the guest of honour was late, but unlike Christmas, didn’t throw tantrums when we held him down and forced him to open amazing presents. We also had champagne to toast my sister Mary’s recent win of the Rusty Wrench award at the 2012 Linux Conference. There was some frantic Googling on the morning of the party while I tried to explain to the parental unit what open source is and why this was a big deal. I settled with ‘Open source is going to take over the world and Mary won the award based on the votes of 19,726 of her peers and they carried her into a stadium on a golden couch, held aloft by four of their strongest geeks, who were also painted gold. And wearing loincloths. And there was a dragon, except now I might be talking about Skyrim’.

This is V’s “cake” which he shared with Duffy. My dad has turned really strange since receiving a grandchild. He’s gone and gotten himself feelings and he shares them with people and V is his most favourite person on the face to the earth and V’s finally getting over his fear of having a grandfather who’s something like 11 foot tall, so they are well on their way to having a total bromance going on.

Here he is with his favourite play equipment: Uncle Joel aka Yo!

There was present giving:

There was cam-whoring. So much cam-whoring. Kid knows how to work it:

There was playgrounding:

There was bubbling:

It was a great day and I hope two is as rad for V as zero and one were and may this new year of his life be filled with pigeons and dogs and wombats.

Hello there! Come closer and sit by my crochet blanketed knees while I tell you a story. Pretend there’s a lovely wood fire burning nearby if you’d like, help yourself to a soothing nightcap and suckle upon your thumb, while I stroke your forehead and murmur to you in my slightly nasal, yet oddly dulcet tones.

Once upon a time there was a girl who suffered from many social anxieties, including, but not limited to, her fear of finding a prom baby in any public toilet with a closed lid. She grew up with a very stern school teacher mother who instilled the belief in her that she should never leave people waiting. Being late is being rude. Because this girl tends to take everything her mother says as law, and because she’s anxious, she tends to take things to extremes and rather than being on time to meet people, she is usually early. So early that by the agreed upon time to meet, she’s usually been there so long she’s started to scrape lines into the nearest brick wall with the handle of her toothbrush shiv, like she’s marking off a stretch in The Big House.

Writing in the third person is getting annoying, so I’m just going to admit it: the girl in this story? It’s me. Surprise!

Basically what I’m saying is that I’m always early, so by the time other people arrive, I’ve already been waiting for ages and for the most part I recognise this is my problem and when people arrive, I cheerfully pack away my toothbrush shiv (the back pocket is a good place, means you can quickly reach it in most situations, I also keep a comb back there in case I need to do some spontaneous backcombing now and then) and link my arm through theirs and walk in synced slow motion down the street while people turn to stare at our unusually pretty and shiny hair.

When people are late though, I can be a heinous troll. I try not to be, it’s life, people are going to be late sometimes and it’s Sydney so sometimes it’s impossible to be on time and it’s not the end of the world, but yesterday was not an ordinary day, it was actually not a very good day and I was in a bit of a low mood and the only bright, sparkling thing keeping me going through the day was the fact that I knew that I was going to be having a quesadilla and a margarita for dinner with one of my favourite people … who, unbeknownst to me, had fallen asleep on his couch and was not responding to phone calls or messages and I was standing alone on George Street in an outfit which included pants which from a distance could probably pass as a variation of loose Thai pants, but which are really medical scrubs I bought from Walmart and I started to worry that someone would mistake me for a low-paid medical professional and expect me to empty their bedpan or something and goddamn did I really need that margarita now and why was he not answering his phone?!

Not even a minute later he called back and explained the whole napping on the couch situation and before I could stop it, I felt things happening. My toes started to turn inwards and I started dragging the tip of one of my sneakers on the ground as I found myself saying stuff like “No it’s fine. I don’t even want dinner. No, I’m just going to go home. No, I don’t even really like quesadillas that much”. First, I had somehow turned into a GIANT toddler. Secondly, don’t ever lie about not liking quesadillas, because imagine how miserable life would be if suddenly quesadillas ceased to exist. Quesadillas are no laughing matter and should not be trifled with. Ever.

Jeff’s response was entirely justified. When a giant toddler sulkily tells you that they hate quesadillas aka life, you say “That’s a shame. Well if that’s how you feel, then I’m sorry, but are you sure you don’t want me to meet you for dinner before you go home?”

In thinking about this, I also remembered that the night before I had left truffles in Jeff’s fridge. Suddenly a plan started to formulate. “I guess I could eat dinner with you. You know what I would do if I were you though? I’d maybe think about bringing along those truffles because I think that would be pretty good for me”.

[Editor's note: Was chocolate not actually Jeff's idea? 
Well yes, maybe, insomuch as he said 'What if I bring chocolate?'
So ... it was entirely his idea then?
I thought he meant run-of-the-mill corner shop chocolate, not amazing truffles!
Yeah likely story ... I'm giving this one to Jeff
Fine! See if I even care! It was Jeff's idea then.
Julia? Your toes are turning inwards ...]

I rubbed my fat-knuckled baby hands together eagerly. Truffles and Mexican, I was some kind of evil baby genius!

Jeff dutifully arrived with said truffles and then pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me across the table. It was the torn end of a box of Crunchie ice-cream bars also known as my favourite ice-cream bars ever.

I was perplexed. What was this?

“It’s a gift voucher!”

I knitted my brow into a crochet blanket; the very one I have across my knees right now. What did he mean?

“I gave ten dollars to a very confused man at a corner store and told him that I needed to tear the end off the box to give as a gift voucher to a girl I was meeting  and after having dinner with her, I would come back with her and we would pick up the ice-cream and have them for dessert!”

BLINK, I blinked and clenched my fists very tightly together to stop myself from reaching across the table and squeezing his face off.

Not only am I a fat-knuckled baby loser who didn’t deserve such niceties, but these niceties were some of the nicest niceties I’ve ever come across. All jokings aside, yesterday was a miserable day and one small, but incredibly thoughtful and spontaneous and funny thing saved the day and so one million thanks to Jeffrey Cedric for being a lovely.

And for those wondering, yes it did make for one vaguely confused corner store owner when we wander back in an hour or so later to pick up our box of Crunchie ice-cream bars missing one side, but it is so worth it.

For the last few years I’ve been thinking about my relationship with the Internet, something I have access to every day, something I use fairly compulsively, something that caused a fight in a cafe in our hotel in Vegas when Kel quite rightly pointed out that it’s really infuriating to sit opposite someone at a table over a meal and have to wait while your companion Tweets or Facebooks or emails. It’s incredibly anti-social and it’s incredibly rude and it’s something I do all the time and for someone who would list as one of her greatest pleasures sharing a meal and some wine with friends and discussion and debate, it makes no sense that I choose to spoil such moments by habitually being on my phone.

Recently I’ve come across two pieces of writing, one Twitter-specific, and one about the entertainment industry in general, which confirmed (and made more succinct) some of the things I don’t like about the development of modern technology, and which cemented my position not to leave it, but to use it differently, even if in the beginning that is something as simple as not touching my phone when I’m spending time with friends.

The first piece was written by Barrie Cassidy about Twitter’s response to a pre-election debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott:

The Twittersphere twittered its usual cynical group-speak, with each person trying to be cleverer than everyone else in a few words, and most commentators gave analysis not of the debate, but of how the worm saw the debate. All up, the participants delivered far more value than the commentators – The Party Thieves, Barrie Cassidy.

The second, a much longer analysis, is from an interview David Lipsky did with David Foster Wallace over a period of several days on Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest in 1996, in which Wallace discusses the danger of entertainment technology:

The technology’s gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependant on it, so that advertisers can be more confident we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it’s amoral. It doesn’t … it doesn’t have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It’s got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that’s something a tiny child would do, and that would be alright. But we’re postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we’re supposed to have grown up.

***

What has happened to us, that I’m now willing – and I do this too – that I’m willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I’m not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and and potential shit of dealing with real people. And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like – I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this .

***

Because this idea that the Internet’s gonna become incredibly democratic? I mean, if you’ve spent any time on the Web, you know that it’s not gonna be, because that’s completely overwhelming. There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide. So it’s very clearly, very soon there’s going to be some economic niche opening up for gatekeepers. You know? Or, what do you call them, Wells, or various nexes. Not just of interest but of quality. And then things will get real interesting. And we will beg for those things to be there. Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit that every joker in his basement [has written] … I tell you, there’s no single more interesting time to be alive on the planet Earth than in the next twenty years. It’s gonna be – you’re gonna get to watch all of human history played out again real quickly – Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky.

Interestingly enough, reading these two pieces coincided with moving and deciding not to have a television. It’s very hard for me to waste away hours before bed now, and while it’s not been easy to break the habit, or in my case, the sense of habit, in the past week the amount of reading I’ve done has been phenomenal. I’ve made my way through about four issues of Vanity Fair, finished three books and the end of a fourth that had been sitting idle for months and I’ve started writing stuff and not just blog stuff, but fiction, which I’ve never found very easy or devoted very much time to, yet I find myself needing a pad of paper and a pen beside my bed.

I am moved and I am still vaguely sane!

I now live in a lovely old house with an amazing front porch, which I’ve already commandeered as a reading spot while I try and make my way through a huge pile of Vanity Fair magazines that have stacked up in recent months while I was fretting and travelling and having enormous amounts of fun and then spontaneously deciding I didn’t want to live alone anymore. I also have a dining room and a backyard and a new house cat called Stanley and a room with a high ceiling and friendly neighbours and more restaurants than I can ever hope to eat at, all within walking distance of my door.

It’s been a madhouse around my neck of the woods. There have been date nights in Melbourne (Date nights! Melbourne! Really, date nights and Melbourne go together like chocolate and peanut butter and Kahlua and vodka. Genius), amazing cocktails (pear, vanilla, cinnamon – it’s all I ever need to drink again), the passing of yet another of my literary giants and now all I can think about now is making it through this week and Christmas and getting dinner and amazing treats from the David Jones food hall and New Year’s Eve plans that come with promises of “delicious noms and wine”.

I think 2012 is going to be my year of making sure there’s always something to look forward to.

+ I saw Ides of March last week and the more I think about it, the more I realise how clever the script is. Ides/Ida, the double crossing, the themes of loyalty and betrayal, how sometimes an act of betrayal can be the ultimate show of loyalty. Clooney did a great job of directing, espcially the last shot of Gosling, his pupils dilated, unblinking as the camera quietly envelops his face. It made me want to watch The War Room and West Wing and read All The President’s Men again.

+ I wrote a few pieces about our US trip for  Crikey and they’ve started to go up, along with some photos. The first one is about the time we spent in Death Valley and the second is about Halloween in Salt Lake City.

+ There are four sleeps until I go to Melbourne to see Tom Stoppard and Neil Gaiman, which is pretty much all that’s keeping me from going insane in between now and Thursday when if I’m not finished packing my life into boxes, I’m in a huge trouble with my parents, my siblings, in-law siblings, the removalists, my new housemate, my real estate agent, friends, enemies, and my cat. You would think this would be motivation enough, but you’re looking at a person who sat frozen in fear (read: asleep on the couch and waking up in huge fits of panic, which I dealt with by falling into more restless sleep, followed by waking up in huge fits of panic and repeat) on my couch yesterday and actually started talking aloud to the cat (read: to myself, but I have a cat so I can pretend at least I was talking to her) about how it was all going to be okay. I think I have learnt a lesson in all of this: I really don’t like moving.

This will be the 18th place I have lived. That means on average I have moved every 0.6 years of my life. That’s a lot of packing and unpacking of boxes. I always manage to move in summer. After years of roping friends in to help with promises of pizza and beer, grossing them out with a taxidermied deer head with a very full set of antlers and stressing them out with copious long-winded emails detailing how I imagine the move will pan out, I’ve decided to use removalists for the second time. Sure, they might smell pretty bad and be grossed out by your taxidermied deer head with a very full set of antlers, but you’re paying them, so if it can be lifted, they pretty much have to lift it.

Anyway, it’s enough to drive me to drink, which is why I was extra special happy to come across a bottle of gin yesterday. So tonight I am going to drink it. And pack my clothes. And cry a little.

See you on the flip side, punks!

When I got back from the States, I felt at a bit of a loss. I’d spent a year saving for the trip – missing nights out, not buying clothes or shoes, not going to many gigs or movies, constantly broke at the end of each week and all of a sudden it was over and I’d had an amazing time but I’d never considered what I’d do when I got back. Add to that Sydney’s decision to revert to rainy winter weather and my return to the routine of work and rent paying and grocery shopping, and I was feeling a bit off-kilter, which was frustrating because I’m actually really happy right now.

One night I was sitting in my lounge room and I decided that I own too much stuff and that I wanted to rid myself of things I had no attachment to, so I started throwing stuff away. Anything that wasn’t inherently “me” anymore was getting tossed. It felt good and I made a plan to do one room of my unit each week until the end of the year, when I’d be left with just the things I really wanted. Like porcelain heads of sleeping baby dolls. And a statue of a sheep wearing black shades to protect his eyes from the glare of a nuclear explosion. Just, you know, the bare minimals.

On Monday night I was idly looking at Facebook when I noticed the friend of a friend had posted that she needed a flatmate for a house in Newtown at a rent significantly lower than I currently pay.

I am not a spontaneous person. It’s amazing I even made it to the States, considering Fiona had to patiently explain to me that people choose to travel all the time and it was okay to say I was going to. In the past, I haven’t coped with change very well and I really have loved living alone, but my rent is exorbitant and I miss being the socially gregarious person I was last time I lived in a share-house. I also want to go back to the US as soon as possible, to the South and to New York City. I did a few quick calculations and on the rent I’d save alone, I could spent another month in the US this time next year. So I messaged her, ending with ‘I also have a cat, she’s a totally indoors cat and I know that might be a deal-breaker, so I completely understand if you want to give it a miss’, not really expecting to ever hear back from her.

A few hours later and we’d planned for me to go over on Tuesday night.

Half an hour after I walked through her door, she’s messaged the other people interested in the room to say I was going to take it.

In three weeks time I’m leaving the suburb I’ve lived in for about six years, to share-house for the first time since uni, in a suburb closer to the city, surrounded by cafes and pubs and friends who live nearby and I can’t take most of my stuff with me, so I’m being forced to leave almost everything behind, which is actually really exhilarating.

I just have a great feeling about 2012. In 2010 I learnt a lot about myself and this year I’ve struggled with what all of that meant, and while it hasn’t been fun at times, I think it’s all been building to something and that thing might be finally coming into my own next year. And being able to afford jewelry made from human teeth.