On holidays

Spent the weekend in Canberra after spending the previous one in Cairns - my half-hearted attempt to tour places in Oz beginning with 'C'. It was lovely and cold, as well as cultural and Mum looked after me very well. Putting up with my self-centredness and even buying me lots of purple maternity gear, since the belly is growing and kicking away. I have booked my bed in the hospital and there's no going back now.

My favorite part of Canberra was the National Museum, which was free (excellent), vibrant (excellent) and pretty inoffensive (amazing). I was a little annoyed that the short film introducing the Museum and the story of Australia had no subtitles for speakers of other languages but I hope that eventually Australia will realise that our langauge is not always easy to follow, even if you speak fluent English. The First Australians exhibit also impressed me, as well as teaching me that the Tasmanian Aboriginies are alive and well - always good to actually learn something at a museum.

Funnily enough though, the best exhibition was from New Zealand about the journey to conquer the Pacific by 'the ancestors'. It was really well done and quite thrilling, to think that they had the navagational techniques to sail a canoe across the Pacific to find all those islands, some of which are tiny. I feel I have acheived something by managing the grocery shopping. Makes you wonder if we've really gone forwards at all.

http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/vakamoana/

Up the duff

Sooo I'm pregnant. The I can't believe it stage has given way to a weird kind of acceptance. It's a bit like being told you're going to the moon. You have seen it on TV and you have a basic idea about what it involves but actually doing it is extremely remote from your life experience. I keep looking warily at screaming children and wondering why I am doing this again. I suspect my desires and needs had nothing to do with it, this is my body just doing it's thing.

Which is pretty exciting really. I can't think of another time in my life when I felt so at the whim of the physical. Every day the bump gets bigger and I'm watching it like a facinated gardener watching their seeds grow into seedlings. Amazing that all that stuff I learnt in year seven biology is happening in my body. It works! Who would have thought all that life giving potential was lurking beneath.

Unfortunately, as thrilled as I am to be pregnant, I don't really look it, I just look rounder than usual. There is a sign on buses and trains for the people you should vacate the seat for and the prego lady is thin with a big bump out front. I am beginning to realise that that is not going to happen to me. I am slowly acquiring a waist that otheriwse copious doughnuts would give me. At the end I think I'll look more like a large bell than a stick with a bump. As a bonus, I also have enormous breasts and keep accidently flashing my students cleavage in tops which were previously quite chaste. So not only am I more voluptuous than usual, I'm also a bit of a poser. Not the serenly maternal look I was expecting.

The daily grind

After much frustration, thanks to the lovely computer guy at work, I think I've finally worked out what the problem is with my computer being so agonizingly slow I have barely written an email over the last six months, let alone on this blog. And what do you know? It turns out to be the bloody anti-virus software that's slowing me down. Which, like a sucker, I paid eighty bucks for. I don't care if I'm invaded by hackers who destroy the hard drive, anything is better than staring at that little rotating circle and wondering if you should give up or just wait a few minutes longer to send that one email you've been trying to send for ten minutes...

The only reason I bought the software was that I accidentally deleted the software that came with the computer in a misguided effort to speed the damn thing up. Which proves I should not be left alone with a computer and a plan. Anyway cross my fingers, it all seems to work now.

Only two weeks till Christmas, which means two glorious weeks off work. Can't wait. I plan to ride my bike, cook, go out, celebrate and spend time with people in a relaxed frame of mind, with no work peering over my shoulder. Oh, and I also plan on watching a lot of TV, and a few movies. I saw Australia last week and loved the sheer excess of it. Wonderful scenes, music, comedy, drama. It was an all you can eat buffet and I gorged myself, even when I knew it wasn't good for me. Ah Hugh.

Today I was in Roseville paying my lovely dentist $10 a minute to take care of my teeth. Just before I had that privilege, I wandered into a shop which seemed to be entirely filled with upmarket party products. No waving Santas here. A woman in the shop with her toddler was discussing the difficulty of sending her kids of different ages to one of the states most elite private boys schools. "It's so hard when you have two boys," she said "because you've got to drive them to two different campuses." And people think the rich have it easy. Personally I went to a school when I was six, rather than a campus. I wonder what the difference is? Possibly the quality of the lawn on the tennis courts.

The more I see the less I know

Last night I went to see Micheal Franti and Spearhead at the Enmore Theatre and had a fantastic time. I'd forgotten how fabulous the theatre itself is, all deco and shabbiness, and we sat up the top so had a great view. The band came on with so much energy and never stopped, they are a combination of high-energy, inspirational lyrics and raw sex appeal. I haven't enjoyed myself on a Tuesday night like that for ages.
And they had many sniffer dogs, which gave me the sense of being part of some underground drug-fuelled anti-establishment swarming mass. A far cry from the staid English teacher I am during the day. Which is always nice.

http://www.spearheadvibrations.com/

Three things

There are three things which have been a large part of my life this week. They are The Flight of the Concords, hay fever and two books which have made their way into my mental landscape. The Flight of the Concords is a wonderful show. I love it because it satirises many things I like to make fun of, such as men, women, pop music, homophobia, Australian nationalism, American culture and the idea that consulates do any real work. It also gives me hope that in the USA there are many who have an excellent sense of humour and couldn’t possibly vote for a female version of George Bush. The tracks are quite catchy too.
The hay fever is less welcome. I have itchy eyes, a snotty nose and every morning I wake up feeling unrefreshed and lethargic. The only thing the medication does is dry up my nose for a few hours. Every year it feels like my hay fever is getting worse, and for someone who’s never been allergic to anything, being allergic to spring seems incredibly unfair. I love spring. I also love plants and pride myself on my ethical diet and lifestyle. It seems like nature’s way of saying I’m not a real environmentalist. A real greenie surely wouldn’t have to medicate against flowers.
The books I’ve read are The Book Thief and Reading Lolita in Tehran. One novel, one autobiography. Both beautiful and a little self-indulgent. I loved The Book Thief from the first page when I realised it was written from the viewpoint of Death. There’s something about this device I find incredibly comforting. The idea that Death has a consciousness makes it so comprehensible and less alien. It would be so good to believe that Death cared about us, that when we die in terrible ways or simply when we die, that there is some being who notices it and registers the horror of it. Anyway I loved the book from then on. The other thing about it was that it was an unashamed celebration of books, as was the second book I read Reading Lolita in Tehran. Both books reminded me of the power of words to make life bearable, in fact even to give it meaning.
Now the lovely Kate B has given me Persepolis which is a perfect sequel to Reading Lolita in Tehran. There’s so much I don’t know about that part of the world. I love the way that learning about it is like watching a map become detailed while I look at it, things are illuminated I didn’t know were in the dark. I’m starting to understand something about Islam and women. The benefit of knowing very little about a subject is that it’s a perfect excuse to spend hours reading about it.

Work life balance

It's been a very long time since I last wrote anything on this blog and unfortunately I don't have an even moderately exciting reason for my virtual absence. Just bloody work, work and more work. I have no patience with new jobs. I'd like to go from the awkward, first days when you don't know anyone and have no idea what you're doing to the chummy familiarty and weary repetition of tasks in a few months. I've been working at my new place of work for over four months and it's still so damn exhausting and I still don't have any friends. Well, not really. So I can't even whinge about it with the regularity I'd like, I have to come all the way home and complain to S, which he unsurprisingly doesn't love.
What makes it all the more irritating as well, is that I suspect my job isn't actually that hard, and that I'm doing fine. This seems to be the feedback I've got from other people. Which makes it even more illegitimate to moan about how I'm tired all the time, can't keep up with the work and want to go and live on a kibbutz. Now. Today.
The one bonus of all this is the amount of reading I'm doing on the commute. I'm going through three books a week and loving it. In Germany I didn't read much out of a sense of guilt about the fact I was reading English rather than German and even when I did, the supply of cheap books was limited. Luckily for me I've forgotten all the plots of my books so I'm happily rediscovering my entire book collection. It turns out I have quite good taste.

Warning: self-indulgent rant

Today is one of those blah days where my body seems to be inhabited by a black hole, located pretty much dead centre of my chest. Anytime I try to make a decision about what to do with myself a surge of hopelessness and lethargy jumps out of me and sweeps that desire away, replacing it with an aimlessness and restlessness which has seen me waste a whole day on doing small pointless jobs that are a distraction from my own inner monologue.

It must be the weather. It’s a grey day, with the occasional drizzle (like right now when I want to play frisbee) and a sort of heaviness in the air, like before a storm. There’s just enough wind to need a few layers. The noisy birds continue to chirp, but somehow it seems ominous to have cheeping birds without sun. Dreary, dreary day.

At times like this I wonder how reliable my own perception really is. Obviously, the world is coloured by my emotional state more than I’m willing to believe. If birds seem creepy when I’m feeling down, who’s to say that my assessment of what’s great when I feel good is any less crazy? That said, how am I supposed to evaluate anything? Through a serious of tests that have nothing to do with how I’m feeling? Ultimately I have to set benchmark based on my experience, but my experience when? When I feel good, as if the world if full of joy, or when I feel demotivated and lifeless?

I guess the difference between happy and troubled people is what they choose to see. Someone once said to me “But things are basically good the way they are!” and I thought they were wrong. I still think they were, but I understand the need to believe it.