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Every year I try to buy myself something for Christmas. Mostly it’s some ridculously large piece of jewelry, by which I don’t mean expensive, though I admit, I once bought a pair of earrings that cost more than my weekly rent did at that stage and I was very poor and had buyer’s remorse and could barely look at them, but now I love them and wear them all of the time so it’s justifiable. When I say large, I mean large. If a ring isn’t big enough to do some serious damage in a bar fight, that ring is not worth wearing. I am sitting here right now with hoops in my ears that are big enough to put my fist through. Go large, or go home.

I think it is safe to say that I am not one for delicate or understated jewelry. I think, in part, it’s because of the face I was born with. There’s nothing understated about my face and once I’d gotten over that early teen thing of wanting to look exactly like everyone else, I was realised I needed to step up and own it and so I decorate it with as much loud stuff as I can, which combined with chronic bitchface, I think has prevented me from being shivved on multiple occasions.

This year I want to buy myself something from L.S.D (Little Sister Designs), a jewelry designer from New Zealand, who makes very solid and orgasmically macabre pieces. Charlotte is away at the moment, so there’s not much stock on her Etsy site, but when she’s back, you best believe we’re going to be talking about her rings, some of which she adorns with human teeth (for the record, although I understand that some people might find that off-putting, I grew up in a household where there was a jar of human teeth, so I don’t find the idea of wearing them particularly repulsive or strange).

However, because the jewels are worth a pretty penny and I’m about to give away many pretty pennies to removalists and real estate agents, I decided today I might need to downgrade for Christmas and gift myself a new ring as a Congratulations You Survived Moving, You Idiot present next year and so I was left  wondering what to gift myself for Chistmas. Then I saw this:

Now I just have to find that sucker.

My life at the moment is basically one long list of things I need to do by December 15.

Some of it is fun, like Tuesday night’s Kurt Vile gig. Most of it is not fun, like several appointments with my crazy Russian doctor.

I have spent a lot of time with The Russian this year. I am constantly perplexed by her inability to emote and her love of extracting blood from me. She is constantly perplexed by my inability to follow convoluted medical instructions and arrive in her office without tripping over my headphones. I also cannot for the life of me remember the name of anything I’ve ever been prescribed. We’ll discuss my blood pressure and I’ll eagerly remind her that I take however many milligrams of the first medicinal name that pops into my head. She’ll dourly inform me that that drug I just mentioned? That’s a contraceptive pill and if I’m taking that for high blood pressure, I might as well eat a meal of Oportos and Krispy Kreme and die right now, on the spot.

However, I feel that there’s a warmth growing between us now, and I no longer pee a little when she barks ‘JULIA?’ into the waiting room. She also has a matronly bosom, though I don’t think we’re at the stage where resting my head on it would provide comfort. One step at a time.

Really this is just a short note to say I have many things to say, many tales to tell and hopefully by the end of this week I’ll be slightly more on track with everything I need to get done for my move and I can tell you all sort of things like how it felt to meet my blogging idol goddess is Seattle and how my first ever bra fitting went (separate events, people, separate events. There are some dreams that will never come true).

In the mean time, just know that while you’re out doing fun things, most nights I’m at home, vacantly staring into space, holding a copy of Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised in my slack right hand, trying to decide if I really want to keep a copy of one of the greatest lit-wank pieces I’ve ever struggled through, while also wrangling a cat who’s taken to 3am temper tantrums.

My grandmother Mamie passed away on Friday morning, the last grandparent I had, my mum’s mum.

Despite having every reason to expected it, I don’t think I really did. She had a stroke right before Christmas, something no-one thought she’d survive, the odds were heavily stacked against her heath-wise, but she made it. Her mind was already ravaged with dementia, something that struck her just as my grandfather passed away, his own mind lost to what is a horrifically cruel disease. It should have been a new beginning for her, the burden of care lifted, instead she fought the rising fog of her own confusion.

After the stroke, she moved from the hospital back to her home, requiring a lot of care, and she stayed with us, soft skin, soft hair, always the gentlest eyes, but she started to slip away slowly. There were numerous scares, Mum making many drives to be with her, each time family rallying, preparing.

It happened so many times that on Thursday night, I guess I thought I’d wake up the next day and we’d again marvel at how much strength the human body has. Instead I woke to a phone call, just before my alarm went off, my heart pumping so loudly I could hear it, and I knew before I even answered that she’d gone.

She died in her sleep sometime between about 5:30am and 7am, just as the sun was coming up, and when she was found, she looked peaceful.

The last few days have been strange. My three other grandparents, Pete, Nan and Da all died suddenly and the grief was instant and furious, but this time it’s been sitting in my stomach for days, like a rock, making it hard to go to sleep and to swallow. I felt bad, like I wasn’t mourning properly and spent the entire weekend reading books I think I was hoping would provoke me to feel the shock I felt the other three times.

I realised today that it’s just different. She was my textbook sweet grandmother: she charmed us, always spoke to us like we were adults, indulged our interests and sugar needs. She was too good to suffer like she had and she’d told us she was ready. I can’t grieve the way I have before because I’m happy she’s free.

We spent so much time with her when we were kids. We lived in the same city for a while, and when Steph was sick and Mum and Dad were dealing with any number of long-distance hospital trips and medical emergencies, Mamie was there. I remember one Christmas when Steph was precariously close to the edge, and Mum and Dad had told us that it didn’t look like we’d be able to have Christmas, so Mamie took Mary and me to Sydney. I loved that she negotiated the city like a pro, having grown up there. She wasn’t like other grandparents I saw, she knew exactly where we needed to be, switching trains, moving through the crowds, and at last we arrived at David Jones, and stood, amazed at the sheer scale of the city and of the intricate, embellished Christmas window displays. When we got home, there was a Christmas tree set up for us. I’m not sure I ever told her how much it meant to have someone take us out of the centre of the storm and make something magical for us.

She and Da travelled a lot, and they returned once from America, armed with lots of Halloween decorations. One day she was babysitting me, and after brainstorming about what we could do for the day,  we went to great lengths to decorate their house with fake spiderwebs, and nasty looking plastic spiders. We made our hair grey to look like witches and waited with great anticipation for Da to come home. I was so little that I seriously expected him not to recognise us and would be terrified at the sudden appearance of two witches: a vaguely familiar one, and her minute counterpart. I couldn’t wait to scare him. Instead, he walked in, didn’t see us hiding beside the door, didn’t see or chose to ignore the elaborate mess of cotton and spiders and went into his office. I glanced incredulously at my fellow witch before we fell about laughing, a joke I don’t think Da was ever really in on. When we were kids, she was one of us, a peer, someone we could trust, an enabler of mischief.

She took us to the theatre, the Opera House, wrote beautiful cards, loved a vaguely blue joke or euphemism, all the while being extraordinarily classy. She got to meet the great-grandchild she wanted so badly, never really learnt how to use a CD player, though must take sole responsibility for introducing me to the soundtrack to Cats, which I like to sing loudly in the shower, and remains (sorry Mum, I have to include it) the only person I’ve ever heard use the phrase “wetty what not”.

I like what I’ve inhereted from her: a unsatiable sweet tooth, a love of whiskey, the growing inability to see three feet in front of me without glasses and a hatred of cooking. I will say though: her salted beans are still the only beans I’ve ever eaten willingly. I wish I’d inherited her sparkling, kind eyes, her patience and her extrodinary generosity.

She was the darling.

We will love you forever, our Mamie.

1. Cloud Control, Circular Quay, 26th January, 2011/ 2. & 3. Vivid Festival, Circular Quay, 14th June, 2009/ 4. Fight the Power! party, Newtown, 7th August, 2010.

The temperature had fallen with the sun. Marathe listened to the cooler evening wind roll across the incline and desert floor. Marathe could sense or feel many million floral pores begin to slowly open, hopeful of dew.

***

And they could both feel this queer dry night-desert chill descend with the moon’s gibbous rise – a powdery wind down below making dust to shift and cactus needles whistle, the sky’s stars adjusting to the color of low flame – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, pgs 97 and 109.

Perhaps you have parents like mine. The type of parents who are a bit tough love when it comes to getting over your fears. The type that tell you that if you don’t know something, you should just ask, because people don’t judge you for asking.

Oh parents!

Let’s cut to the chase. People are always judging you and typically, you will find a way to make yourself look foolish when asking a stranger a question. I do it all the time. At least seven and a half times a day I make myself look foolish (the half is when I deduct half a point for at least attempting to recover from looking foolish).

For example, the other day I was at the gym for a training session. Let me illustrate here my relationship with pysical activity: at the end of year 10, my PE teacher pulled me aside and told me that even if I wanted to, he wouldn’t allow me to continue doing PE for the final two years of high school. After enquiring if he was on drugs, I wandered past the athletic girls doing all kinds of springs and twists and whatever else you do in gymnastics and back to my friends, where we continued doing what we’d been doing for most of the summer months in PE: talking about music and skanking, and when that was too arduous, lying around in the sun.

So when I started going to a gym recently and got a personal trainer, I immediately regressed to high school and when she talks to me, my mind goes blank and I start to wonder if she’s passing bitchy notes to other trainers about how my fringe looks like my mum cut it (which, to be fair to the girls in high school, she did). Because I’m mentally back in a classroom that smells of wet wool and teenage hormones, I’m rarely ever listening to my trainer, and the other day I realised she was standing there, waiting for me to respond to something, so I panicked and picked what I thought was a really relevant response to pretty much anything a trainer could have said, and I enthusiastically yelled, ’Awesome!’

Immediately I knew I was in trouble, because she went silent and stared awkwardly at me. Next thing I knew, I had launched into a huge diatribe about how much I love going to the gym and how if I don’t go for a few days, I start to miss it, all the while squeaking the toe of my sneaker on the floor and feeling short of breath.

Finally she raised an eyebrow, turned around and made me do pushups. I still have no idea what she said to me.

Imagine my horror then, when I realised I really needed to pee. I casually looked around, hoping to see a sign for the toilets, I tried to pretend I hadn’t followed my trainer into her office, hoping she was going to an un-signposted toilet, and while I was marching across the room swinging a medicine ball over my head I was sternly reminding myself that I am Julia, Julia who has never peed outside, Julia who made it through countless long distance holiday drives with her family as a kid without ever once needing to stop for an emergency toilet break. I am Julia whose mother has said she has the bladder of a camel numerous times. Camel Bladder, they call me (actually they don’t, they call me Fluffy, but that’s a different story for a different day).

Now, my mother is reading this and she’s sighing, ‘Oh Julia!’, both because she can’t believe I like to talk about my toiletry habits on the Internet, but also because she’s thinking to herself, ‘Why does this daughter of mine not just ask her friendly trainer where the toilet is?’

You know what Ma? I didn’t ask. Instead, I exercised so frantically that my body used up every single iota of liquid in it, just to make it through the workout, thus negating my need to find the toilet.

You should see how smug my face is right now.

And so, my advice? There is absolutely no need to confront your fears or engage other people in small talk. Follow my advice and you can be just like me.

Edit: my lawyer has advised that this post could be construed as me giving advice which suggests you shouldn’t pee, and that in doing so, I am leaving myself open to lawsuits pertaining to the bursting of bladders, so please, if you need to pee, do so. Also, this provides a really nice segue into the story about the time when I didn’t pee, and there were dire consequences. Let’s talk about that tomorrow. To make sure you come back, I’ll tell you now, the post will contain the word ‘breast’, or ‘boob’ if I’m feeling more lighthearted.

I’m not someone who buys expensive things, or things with designer names, or nice things, or grown up things, or things that I don’t get over in five minutes, but I recently saw these reading glasses and they are Prada and for people with nice houses and grown up jobs and who don’t wear sneakers every day and you have friends over for backyard barbecues where everyone stands around in their perfectly ironed clothes, sipping wine, going ‘Hahahaha!’ at some witty joke that may have had a slightly sexual Nabokov reference.

Even so, I think I am in love with them.

But.

I cannot decide between the black and the pink.

My heart is screaming black:

But my head keeps going back to pink:

Either way, I figure they might be part of my bonus this year. By then, surely I will have decided.

I can’t believe tomorrow is the last day of the year! And what a year it was. 2010, bar a few bumps in the road towards the end, was just the year I needed. I’m really excited about 2011.

Right before I was meant to head off to New Zealand for Christmas, my much loved grandmother had a massive stroke. Things did not look good and I spent two days with family in Newcastle, at her bedside.

Despite everything, she survived and while the situation is complicated, to say that I am relieved is an understatement.

It did mean the the New Zealand trip was on, then off, then back on again, and having one evening to pack and get ready to go overseas for a week was an adventure in itself. Until the day before we left, we weren’t even sure we had our flights back. All of this meant that many of the things I meant to post about before the end of the year went by the wayside.

I hope everyone had an amazing Christmas and is as excited about the new year as I am!

Vincent got to open a few Christmas presents early, before his jet-setting grandparents and aunt jet-setted off. He’s so redunkulously cute.

Merry Christmas everybody.

I was going to make a huge list and then I stopped feeling like it, and couldn’t think of anything to say about a lot of this year’s music other than ‘rad’ and ‘super good’ [which isn't to say it wasn't really good, just that I'm not much of a music writer]. Instead I picked my two favourites.

Josiah Wolf – Jet Lag

In December last year I saw Why? at the Annandale in Sydney and I played one of their songs, ‘The Vowels, Pt. 2′ repeatedly, every day, for most of that summer. Yoni Wolf’s lyrics are the most intense, perfect lyrics I’ve ever heard.

Before the gig, I liked Why? a whole bunch. After the gig, Why? were my favourite band. The energy from the crowd that night was amazing. Even before they stepped onstage, I knew it was going to be a special gig. My good friend, a wonderful live music photographer, Meesh Ho, took photos of the band that night.

The crowd was relatively small, the band was selling their own merch and watching Seekae’s support set. My favourite pre-show moment was when Steph came back from the bathroom and said ‘Well. Josiah was in the women’s toilets. We both were confused, but he’s really lovely!’

When onstage, he’s like a crazy, lovely human version of Animal.

As is my luck, I became a rabid Why? fan right around the time they’d just released an album, and so while I waited for new material, I tore through their back catalogue, again and again. I was very happy then to hear the news that Josiah was releasing a solo album, Jet Lag. I was also nervous. It would pit Wolf against Wolf in my auditory battlefield.

Turns out I need not have worried. Jet Lag is a gorgeous break up album with percussion that twinkles. It feels like that moment just before you drift off to sleep. I’ve spent a lot of afternoons this year lying on my couch with the Wuz listening to this album.

‘The New Car’ is my favourite track, being especially lovely:

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse – Dark Night of the Soul

Dark Night of the Soul is my aural masturbatory fantasy album. A dark album about death and partially justified redemption, with music from Sparklehourse, twisted by Danger Mouse, with disturbing images courtesy of David Lynch? I was born and bred to own this album.

The album has vocalists from Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, Jason Lytle, Black Francis, Vic Chesnutt and Iggy Pop to name but a few, yet it’s so cohesive for an album which came together in parts. It’s as dark as sin and unrelenting.

Sadly, both Vic Chesnutt and Sparklehorses’s Mark Linkous committed suicide before the album had an official release, making listening painful and poignant. If Jet Lag is my afternoon album, Dark Night of the Soul has seen me through many nights on the same couch, same view but darker, fuelled by bourbon and the good kind of despair. 

These two tracks are gorgeous:

Honourable mentions:

Envy – Recitation/Julie Christmas – The Bad Wife/Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky/Evelyn Evelyn – Self Titled/Atmosphere – To All My Friends, Blood Makes the Blade Holy/Red Sparowes – The Fear is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer/Harvey Milk – Small Turn of Human Kindness/Jesu – Infinity/Laurie Anderson – Homeland/Crazy Heart soundtrack/Sage Francis – Li(f)e/Cloud Control – Bliss Release/Liars – Sisterworld/Melvins – The Bride Screamed Murder/Jonneine Zapata – Cast the Demons Out/Shutter Island soundtrack