Tag: writing

How To Feel Sexy In A Flood

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Step 1:

The ground around here is saturated, but the hair on my head is dry as straw. I should go and get it cut, but the only hairdresser in town intimidates me, so I leave it limp and box-dyed with split ends hanging lower than they have in a decade.

I should have used more conditioner.

Step 2:

I can’t even shave my legs, because to even point a razor in the direction of the topographic map of itchy, pink mosquito-borne welts that passes for skin from my thighs down would be to invite a half dozen Krakatoas to burst their aggravated peaks, running lava-blood races down my calves. (They’re already doing that enough, purely thanks to my constant unconscious scratching.)

In an unexpected boon, however: I have gotten surprisingly good at smashing the life out of those bloodsucking little bitches mid-air, so at least my hand-eye coordination is improving.

Step 3:

Spend far too much of the money you were meant to be saving on stockings and suspender belts, only to find that your legs really are the wrong shape for that style, and after all, they’re too sheer to wear on unshaved legs, and we already know how well that crusade is going.

Step 4:

One thing I doubt I will ever learn is How Not To Lust After Incredibly Interesting and Attractive (And Thus Utterly Unattainable) Men, minoring in Especially If they Live 100’s of Kilometres or More Away.

Here is another night spent annoying my dog with the sound of my fanticising about someone so far out of my league that we’re basically playing entirely different sports, while I simultaneously wish he were just a little or a lot less handsome so I could stop worrying that the desire for friendship might be driven entirely by lustiness and hopeless romanticism instead of a genuine interest in the actual human being in question.

How can it be that someone so incredibly besotted with the notion of Happily Ever After-style love can be so utterly bewildered by the idea that it could ever fit in her own brain? That the feeling of warmth and hope for a special person’s future could comfortably reside with a physical attraction and be reciprocated? Sir, I am pretty damn certain that triangle is only permitted two corners in this story.

In conclusion, god damn it, I want to fuck him so bad, but also get to know him, but I’m pretty sure my fate is just to be a weird spinster with a dog.

Also: if you want high quality, ethical porn, you ned to pay for it.

Step 5:

Be isolated. Notice that the last time you felt human touch was when you hugged your mum goodbye weeks ago, and with all the roads out of town closed, you have no idea when you will again. Worry that you’re forgetting how to be intimate, or even just how it feels. You Stress that you don’t mean “intimacy” in a sexual sense, but rather that aura of cosiness shared with another human being where you feel like they might actually be able to see you, like a dust particulae in the thinnest ray of sunlight. Ache from the loss of it, grieving to the point where you could cry, and you desperately want to, but the path your tears would take stays dry, because there’s no water left to fall from your eyes.

It’s all in the river.

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A rocky shoreline, with waves coming in. The sea is relatively calm, but there is plenty of foam.

Like The Ocean – a spoken word poem

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Fuck me to the sound of the ocean
In a cottage on a cliff
On a big brass bed that creaks with each ragged breath
We push from our heaving lungs

Fuck me to the rhythm of the tides
We won’t be making love
We’ll be making waves
As high as mountains
That will make the rivers jealous
That will wash away the rockpools
And send uncertain sand dunes into the sea
To travel beneath the water line
Until they settle on a new shore
Building islands out of our sweat and touch and heat.

Fuck me to the sound of the ocean
Release the nereid within me
Send her back to her home in the spray
Away from this feeble human body
Let her run with the horses
Rushing at the shore
Before she catches the riptide out to the wide blue yonder
To the Pacific, swallowing half the world
The Atlantic, unforgiving and violent
To the Antarctic, cold and full of secrets
Until she returns to Poseidon’s arms
For their sabbatical on land
Where they will fuck on a noisy bed
In a house by the sea
Until the waves roll them out again.

*****

This poem was written at 4am, recorded at 3pm, with production completed at 11pm, all on Friday July 24, 2020.

I’m not certain if it might be something, but I’d love to see if I can get some other poets to write and record a new poem in under 24 hours, and then make a podcast out of it.

Working title: Pantseat Poetry.

Whether something will come of it remains to be seen. (I shan’t hold my breath.)

x N

A page with handwritten notes lies next to an album with the title "A Photo A Day" and the corner of an open notebook.

Little Decisions, Little Projects

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Before I start this week’s blog, I want to treat you to a little (relevant) musical interlude.

Since the start of this year (and to be honest, since very late last year), I have been doing my best to commit myself to a handful of little things. So far, they include: a weekly-ish blog post, a photo a day, a few pages of a (secret) major project a week, organising a climate action protest, a nightly routine… It’s not a long list, but there’s certainly a few things on it.

While I was in Canberra, I found these things relatively easy to achieve. Despite sharing a one bedroom flat with my mate Sophie (who has a brilliant podcast you should listen to) for the better part of a week, I managed to develop a degree of routine to my days, ticking through things I wanted for myself, both in terms of being constructive on a personal and slightly more professional (is this blog professional? idk) level. I wrote. I remembered my meds. I started to organise a small scale protest against climate change. I even found myself waking up naturally at a reasonable hour. It was freakin’ great.

But the day after my return to Dubbo, I felt all my energy sapped. Wednesday, the day I’d set aside to write this blog post, was a write off: I started it with an “ice pick” headache – the kind where you feel like someone is ramming an ice pick into your temple – which was then followed with waves of bleakness that is the hallmark of my lighter depressive episodes. In the days since, I’ve struggled to get things back on track, which I was really hoping wouldn’t be the case – surely a week is enough to build the beginnings of good habits?

Nevertheless, I’m still doing my best to make attempts at following through on these little things, doing my best to make the little decisions required to get through the day without feeling like I’ve done nothing with it. It’s really fucking hard, and I don’t think that it’s visible from the outside just how difficult it is to have to consciously think through every step of being a functional human being, but I’m trying.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wash my face, brush my teeth, take my meds, write in my diary and get into bed, because that’s what real people do, and that’s what I’m (re)learning to be.

Photograph: A piece of cooked meat on a piece of slate, with a fork on one side and a knife on the other. It is set on a black stone table top partially covered with a red and white checked tea towel. Credit: Markus Spiske via Stocksnap.io

The Last Barbecue

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Kevin had thought about the ideal location for weeks before settling on this spot. It wasn’t far from his favourite camping spot, where he and the boys would set up for long weekends of fishing and rabbit hunting. Now he was here and it was really happening, all those memories were making him dry in the mouth. He was getting choked up. He wasn’t going to cry, though. Kevin was a man with a job to do. One last job.

He pulled out fifty cents from his pocket, pressed the starter button, and laid his barbecuing tools out on the bench next to the hot plate. While he waited for it to heat up, he opened the esky. He grabbed a beer out from beside the carcass, skinned and shining under the cling wrap. He paused and looked at it, then he ran a finger down the length of its spine. The flesh squished at his touch, just like any other meat.

Suddenly angered, he slammed the lid of the esky and went back to drinking his beer and prepping for the cook up. It might not be the right thing to do, but he was here now. He was locked in.

Skinning it had taken longer than he’d expected. There were so many little toes to get around. He knew he could have just cut them off, but if he was going to go out this way, he was committed to enjoying every morsel of flesh he could suck off those bones.

When he was satisfied that the tiny corpse was seared to his liking, he picked it up with the barbecue tongs and threw it onto his dinner plate. It nearly filled the whole thing. Perfect.

For almost a year now, he hadn’t been able eat a single mouthful of sausage, a sliver of steak, even a taste of chicken breast without breaking into hives, at best. At worst, he would go into full blown anaphylactic shock. The doctors had puzzled over it for months; meat wasn’t something you just became allergic to overnight, if at all. Kevin was a medical curiosity, poked and prodded by dickheads with stethoscopes who couldn’t tell him when he’d be able to sit down to a lamb kebab again. Finally, after analysing test after test and realising that there had been a spike in related cases on Sydney’s North Shore, they asked Kevin if he’d ever been bitten by a tick.

“Yeah,” Kevin had replied. “A couple of times. But I flicked it off and it was all good.” He’d laughed. “Don’t tell me that little bastard’s the reason for all this!”

But it was. Kevin had been struck down by mammalian meat allergy, and he would never be able to eat the flesh of another creature again.

All those beautiful Sunday roasts, Saturday night barbecues and late night Maccas runs had been ripped from his grasp, all because one little bloodsucker bit one little marsupial that couldn’t digest animal products, and then bit him, passing on one tiny protein from that furry bastard into his circulatory system, where it multiplied and took over his body, until he was allergic to that one thing integral to every red blooded bloke’s identity (after beer): meat.

Apparently there’d been a massive increase in the number of bandicoots in the area around Kevin’s place, and with it had come an explosion in the local tick population. Their favourite food? Bandicoot blood, although Kevin was apparently a close second.

After six months of nothing but rabbit food, Kevin had almost lost it. He decided he needed to eat flesh again, even if it killed him, which it probably would. He desperately longed to have something that could bleed between his teeth, something you could order on a range from blue to well done. He wanted to devour a victim of factory farming, from paddock to pan to plate.

The worst bit was watching his wife Sharon chow down on anything she wanted. You could do that when you were pregnant. While she was downing a steak and chips, Kev was stuck sucking on a kale smoothie or some other hippy bullshit. Now the baby was here, the smell of breastmilk was constantly wafting through the house, reminding Kevin of veal and lamb and all the other baby animals that were even more delicious than their parents. It was driving him mad.

He knew he had to get his revenge, even if it killed him.

Kevin took one long, final look at his last meal. He could smell the meat juices hanging in the air, making his stomach queasy while making his mouth water. He pulled out the pictures of his mum, Sharon and baby Eddie one last time, kissed each in turn, then put it down on top of the esky.

He tore into his kill. It was such a relief to taste non-plant based proteins again. Plus, it was fucking delicious.

Once he was done with his grisly feast, Kevin lay down and waited for his immune system to betray him. He thought about what the cops would think when they found his body, probably frothing at the mouth, tiny bones strewn around him, an enamel plate smeared with tomato sauce by his side. He wondered if they’d be disgusted by his crime, or if they would find his tastes understandable once they understood his circumstances. Maybe they had always wanted to do it themselves, but never had the guts to do it. Maybe they’d find it ironic that Kevin didn’t have the guts for it either.

But at least they’d know he had gone down fighting. He hadn’t gone quiet into that good night. He’d seen the cause of his own problem and taken vengeance in his own proud way.

At least they’d know he’d taken one of the bastards down with him.

Fucking bandicoots.

An area of shallow water in a creek.

Downstream

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The rains had come
Upstream
The twins expected thunder
But the river always
Refuses expectations
Instead
The air was still
Save the warbling of the magpies.
Cicadas, light and scorching heat,
Like the rains would never come.

Then we saw it
Slinking slowly
Like the story of the snake
The First of Us have been telling
For thousands of years.

The kids chased its head down the creek bank
As it slithered down the waterway
And I beamed in wonder
At this long withheld blessing.

I saw the twinkle of dew in Mum’s eye.

I took her hand,
And tried to forget all the days
The water had been too late for.

I whispered to her,
Maybe he had to go
Because he knew they wouldn’t listen
Unless he asked in person.

Her grip became a vice
But there was no sound
Despite the streams staining her cheeks.

So that’s how we stayed,
Hand clasped in hand,
As the kids pointed and laughed and raced
The rainbow serpent around the riverbend,
Downstream.

 

*****

This poem won first place in the Open Own Composition section at the 2019 Dubbo Eisteddfod. You can find the adjudicator’s notes on my Instagram.

A blank screen in the word processor, Pages. The typing curser is at the top left of the open page.

Ten Thousand Little Words

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This is the first in what I hope is a series of posts about my goals for 2018. Knowing my tendency to start these things and never follow through, I am incredibly skeptical that any of them will come to fruition (including the completion of this series), so I expect you to come into this entry with the same frame of mind.

1. Write 10,000 words a month.

I have tried NaNoWriMo twice now, and both times have been an absolute failure. I wasn’t even trying to do it properly – both times I had an idea that I had already started working on. The second time, I wasn’t even reaching for the full 50,000 words. Instead, I set myself what I thought was a more suitable goal of 20,000 words on top of what I’d already written (from memory, about 3,000 words). A month on, and I’ve reached 10,000 words of varying degrees of quality on what I believe may be no more than a novella. At this stage, I don’t really care. I just want the damn thing finished.

My last job was a “creative” one, writing advertising for radio. I’d spent my entire life working towards it, but after ten years of work experience, study and working in the industry, I was sick of the job. I was writing for the local street press, and it was scratching my itch to write, but it didn’t feel particularly creative. I had a short story sitting in my To Do pile, and my major project to finish, but nothing was coming to me anymore. I was thinking up ideas in the shower, or dreaming amazing things that set my mind alight with possibilities, but I wasn’t putting any of it on the page. It just stayed in my head, and I did nothing with it.

When I had The Seizure That Turned My Life Upside Down in March 2016, I lost the will (and the ability) to work on anything. I tried to keep my column up for BMA, but it wasn’t giving me the same pleasure it used to. It had become a chore. I thought about blogging again, and did a few times to try and get my anguish out, but it felt hollow and narcissistic. I needed a new project, a new drive, and a new job that wasn’t going to wring all my creativity into 30 second chunks for a wage that was almost half the average wage for the city I lived in.

I achieved the third thing on that list last August. I’m now working for significantly more money, in a (very) challenging job, surrounded by the kind of work culture I could never have dreamed of in the radio industry. The people I work with are incredible, the support I’ve had despite my significant health challenges over the last few months have been beyond my wildest dreams, and I’m learning new things all the time. I’m so incredibly lucky to have stumbled into this organisation. (For a number of reasons, I won’t be sharing the name of my employer here.)

But what about the other two? That need for a project and for that drive to move me forward in terms of my writing?

That’s why I’ve set this goal. Broken down, it works out to be a little under 350 words a day. It doesn’t matter why I’ve written them, what they’re about, or whether I intend to publish them. They just have to exist on the page.

Just 350 little words. Or 2,500 a week. However it happens, a total goal of 10,000 a month.

Even if I only achieve it in January, I’ll be happy with that. Because hell, it’s a start.

And I’ve got 616 words to prove it.

At Risk of Being Wrong, Here’s To 2017

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I feel like being optimistic about 2017 is foolish, but here I am, doing just that. Looking through my journal the other day, I found exactly the same optimism in my first entry for 2016, and look where that got us.

While 2016 was shitty for a lot of people because of wonderful people who died (I’m still not ready to believe Carrie Fisher is gone), or because of certain election results (there’s the obvious US and UK cock-ups, but the Australian election and its repercussions for Centrelink and Medicare scare me more), but the biggest issue for me was my health.

For most of 2016, I was ill. It wasn’t a physical malady, so even I’m a little reluctant to use the term, but there really is no other description that fits the bill.

In March, my epilepsy took me from a place of optimism and drive, to somewhere dark I hadn’t been since 2012. The ensuing depression was some of the worst I’ve ever dealt with, but this time I was willing to be open with those around me about what it was doing to me and the kind of help I was in desperate need of. I can happily say that has started to pay off over the last few months, and I’m getting the medical help I need to move towards the more even keel that will make the shift into the real world and employment a reality.

Last time it took me 10 months to recover; so far I’m clocking in at 9, but I’m in a better position now than I was then. I’ve not been working full time, but I’ve got a couple of freelance clients, and doing those occasional projects has really boosted my confidence in my own writing and in the idea that I might be able to do this as a side project.

Last time, serendipity delivered me back into a radio gig, but now that I’ve decided I need time away from that industry, where I have spent almost my entire career, that won’t be so easy. I’m working with my neurologist and GP to make sure I’m not going at it too hard, and working with Employment Services Group in Braddon to assess what my skills and strengths are so that I can find a job where I will be a good fit. I’m still in the process of completely re-writing my CV for temp work, and I’m still trying to work out what the hell I’m going to apply for, but the cogs are finally turning and I feel like I’ll get to where I’m going in the next month or two. (With the job market in its current condition, that might be a little over-optimistic, but I think I can do it.)

diary 2017In previous posts, I’ve talked about the symbolic importance the New Year holds for me. I like beginnings, but in the past I’ve often struggled to see them through in my personal life. Resolutions fall over in 24 hours, and my optimism barely lasts the week. So why is this time so different to previous years?

This year, I’m taking the advice of Joe Biden, and I’ve made a plan. It could fall through, but I’ve been slowly integrating it into my life over the last month or so, and it seems to be gradually working. I’m getting things done and creating healthy habits, and I’ve not forgotten my medication in at least three weeks! I’ll write a post about it next week (oh yes, I intend to write here a lot more in 2017).

And resolutions? Sure, I’ve made a few, but I’m going to keep them to myself for now. Hopefully I’ll spend 2017 writing about how I’m achieving them rather than reflecting on how I haven’t come close to achieving them…

Getting me through 2016 was a team effort, so there are many thanks that need to be said. Mum and Dad have been the best parents a girl could ask for, looking after me in their home, keeping a roof over my head in Canberra and supporting me as I’ve taken my first shaky steps back into the real world. My sister Justine has given me a lot of hugs when I need them, and I can’t overstate how wonderful that is. Thanks to my best mate Miranda for always being there for a chat and giving me kindness and well-deserved tough love in relevant measure. My housemate Karina, for being incredibly tolerant of my untidy and lazy ways being amplified by my less than ideal condition, and my constant travelling back and forth over the last few months. BMA’s editor Andrew Nardi has been an absolute saint in terms of my struggles to reach deadlines, and so many of my Canberra-based friends – Nigel, Beth, Ali, Cam, Rhonda, David, Josh, Justyna, Bondy, Chris, Nick, Emma, Gerry, Kath and so many more – have been much loved and appreciated connections back to the life I love to live. My former work colleagues have been incredibly kind during my illness, with special mention to Kirstan, who has been the best co-copywriter I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and a bloody good mate who has inspired me with the goals she keeps on kicking. Dr Kaitlyn Parratt at the RPA epilepsy clinic and Dr Chowdury Beg, my GP at Dubbo Medical and Allied Health Group, have both have been absolutely critical in my long term treatment and recovery. To my extended family: I count my blessings every day that I was born into our mad mob. Finally, a massive expression of love goes out to my Internet Party buddies who have been on the front line of most of my expressions of anguish this year: Alex N, Alex B, Fin, Britt, Tim, Lizzy, Beth and Lauretta.

I know 2017 is going to involve a lot of hard work, personally and politically right around the world, but for the first time in a long time, I not only think I’m ready to do it…

…I’m absolutely going to.

Happy New Year.

Ready to go… nowhere?

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Clean desk. A good start.
Clean desk. A good start.

Today is the last day of my week off work. I turned 26 last Sunday, and since that was a strange sort of milestone (one that deserves its own explanation) and I had been working my arse off at work for the last month, I figured I deserved a Break with a capital ‘b’.

It’s been an odd nine days: delightful most of the time, but more sobering towards the end. I spent Saturday through Thursday in Sydney, seeing bands and Men of Letters, going to a neurology appointment (not as dreadful as it sounds), hanging out with my wonderful mum, seeing friends I haven’t seen in ages and meeting new ones.

Friday and Saturday were spent almost entirely in bed, with a brief writing sprint on Saturday morning, before whiling away the late afternoons and evenings by binge listening to The Black Tapes Podcast or jumping between series on Netflix. It was these two days that marked the biggest shift in my mood; I had gone from blissfully plodding through my daily itinerary to flipping between being edgy and numb in the space of what felt like no time at all. Such are the perils of having a neurological condition, I guess.

Despite all the wonderful things I’ve felt and experienced over the last week, I have found myself frustrated. Part of the reason why I took this week off was to work on personal projects: writing blogs, recording audio for a new podcast I’m working on, finishing diaries and getting a new study space in order. This post means I’ve got the first one done (although I guess you could also count the two pieces I wrote for BMA), the second has gotten absolutely nowhere, and I’ve barely made a scratch on the diaries and writing space, even if I did finally manage to get hold of a desk (see above).

One of the projects I wanted to get done... More to come.
One of the projects I wanted to get done… More to come.

Now that I write all that down, I realise I’ve done a lot more in the last few days than I initially thought. It’s definitely far more than I have managed over the last few weeks and months, but I feel like that’s more of an indictment of my laziness, poor mood and terrible management of non-work time and energy rather than any great recent wave of progress.

This frustration has caused me to revisit the memories of the dark days of 2012/13, when I was living at home, depressed and disillusioned. Even though they were the worst ten months of my life, towards the end I was starting to work out how to manage my own time and energy to build personal projects. I was building Gigs Out West in a very slow but steady fashion, starting to do copywriting and voicing jobs for my dad, and I had enough confidence to start applying for jobs again. At the time, I knew that this ‘floating’ time was important, but now I’m stuck wondering what it might have turned into had I stuck with it rather than returning to the conventional workforce.

Until recently, I was sure that I probably would have got absolutely nowhere, but now I’m starting to wish I’d taken it a little bit further. I wish I had more time and far more energy and drive to develop freelancing skills and a resilience that could open new options outside the usual employer/employee working dynamic.

Coming to the end of this week away from the office, I feel like I am ready, just like I was as I came to the end of that ten month period in 2013, to start doing things off my own back. I’m refreshed enough that I have the energy to write my first blog in months, and I’m keen to start sitting down and making stuff at the times that suit me best, like late at night without the worry of having to get up in the morning. I’m ready to explore new ways of thinking and making content, reading and writing and trying to make myself into the person I want to be.

But all the optimism in the world won’t make the following facts go away:

  1. I have to go to work on Monday morning.
  2. I don’t have the money to make that leap into the unknown.
  3. Even if I did have the money to make that jump, would I really be able to afford to take the time I’d need to recalibrate and refresh beforehand?

That’s what has really bothered me for the last few days: just as I’m getting ready to start work on reaching for new horizons, the reality of employment obligations and my financial situation comes up and taps me on the shoulder to remind me that I don’t have the right or the ability to go forth and be an explorer.

The idea that this is how I’m going to spend the next 40+ years of my working life terrifies me even more than the concept of death.

For now, I’m refreshed and ready to get things done, even if it’s a feeling that only lasts for another 24 hours or so. It feels like a waste to use this new energy on housekeeping, but if I can do that, maybe I can get to the next stage?

So despite my misgivings, I am spending today cleaning my room, moving my new desk into place, doing washing and cleaning my bathroom. I have to learn to celebrate the little successes I have when I’m up and going, and then try to keep them rolling. Once I’ve got those sorted, then hopefully everything else will be that little bit easier.

Let's roll.
Let’s do this.

Let’s Start At The Beginning – Blog Carnival 2014

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You Can Do This

I’m not good at making plans. I’m someone who lives so much in the present that I’ve found myself at a point where I don’t know where to go with my future.

Yeah, we’ve been down this road before, but hear me out, just one last time. (At least, I hope it’s the last time…)

I am currently working on a plan like nothing I’ve ever done before. Okay, it’s kind of like something I’ve done before, but it’s different. It’s going to need organisation and plotting and vision and the kind of drive and work ethic that I’ve seen so many of my friends apply to their creative projects but has always eluded me. It’s a new project that I’ve only told a few friends and family about. I’m not quite ready to tell everyone the details yet, but it’s something that has been bubbling away in my brain for a good few months.

Now I’m finally ready to start putting my back into it.

To be honest, it’s not the ideal time to be starting seriously on something like this. I’ve been pretty emotionally fragile lately, and I’m pinning a lot of hope on this being something that drags me out of my funk. If it doesn’t, I’m going to be in quite a spot of bother, but optimism is the key right now.

I don’t know how I’m going to fit it around the fact that I really need to clean my bedroom and my bathroom, make sure I’m feeding myself decent home-cooked meals rather than buying fast food on the way home, or maintain the kind of social life I rely on to make sure I don’t slip into feeling completely isolated in the way that has been slowly creeping into my heart lately. I don’t know how I’m going to budget it around some of my newer financial commitments, or how I’m going to fit it around the fact that I really do seem to need a lot of sleep at the moment. Like I said, this is an endeavour fueled by hope that I can do it, with the occasional burst of I need this to work so that I can get a little bit closer to doing what I want to do full time as a booster.

I’m taking a week off work at the start of August to go home and spend some time with my family, but I’m hoping that it will also be a good time for me to get up and get some work done on this. I want to have the bare bones all laid out by the end of August so that I can start saving for and purchasing the equipment I’m going to need to make this thing work.

Right now, I’m marking out my process, the steps I’m going to have go through in order to get on the right path for this to work. I have to set up a work space and allocate the time I’m going to give to this, whether it be small chunks on weeknights or an extended period once a week on a Saturday or Sunday. I have to do an inventory of the resources I currently have, work out what I need to buy to fill out the rest of my requirements and start looking at the financial options I have to acquire them. I need to start looking for guides and mentors who’ve done this before who are going to be able to help me. I need to start plotting out the format, the progression of thoughts and phases of development. I need to see if I can actually turn this into some kind of business plan, but even if I can, that’s a long way off.

These are all things I’m not used to, and I’ve never really done before. Until now, I’ve always flown by the seat of my pants. I’m trying to totally change the way I work through things, and it’s a shift that I have to make in order to get this thing to work in the way I want and need it to.

My mum has always been keen on planning-related sayings. Fail to plan and you plan to fail. Proper planning prevents poor performance. She’s rattled them off to me a bunch of times, but it’s only now that I’m in enough of a career rut that I’m really starting to see just how important it is sometimes to get past just planning a day or a short term project with a deadline that finishes once it’s completed. For the first time in a long time, I’ve started thinking about longer term goals and how I’m going to reach them. This is me starting to play the long game, with 6 month and 12 month and 5 year goals and all that other stuff that I have always thought to be a pile of wank. Unlike back in high school, when the decision had to be made swiftly and securely, I now know myself well enough to understand what those goals are, how realistic they are and just how I can go about achieving them. I have more knowledge, more contacts and more resources than ever before, and now if the time to use them.

It’s new and it’s scary, and I’m almost inevitably going to fuck it up. But planning is not only necessary to the execution of this idea, it’s one of the core concepts behind it. I’m making a new adventure for myself, but this time I’m not just running blindly into the woods in the hope that I’ll find the things I’m looking for just by flailing around.

For the first time, I’m leaving home with a map. It won’t be perfect, and I’m sure I’ll fall off the trail from time to time, but the idea of being my own personal cartographer is intriguing and challenging and just what I need right now.

I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

*****

It’s taken almost a year for me to get there, but this blog post marks the end of my contributions to Alexandra Neill’s Blog Carnival collaboration project. THEY SAID IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. (“They” = me.)

If you want a refresher on what Blog Carnival was, this is where you need to click your mouse.

Siren Songs

Published on by NoniLeave a comment

Image: zen Sutherland.
Image: zen Sutherland.

I live about a block and a half from a fire station. Because we’re on a relatively busy road (not the main drag, but a street many people take to avoid it), we also get a lot of other emergency vehicles going past on the way to events elsewhere in the Inner North.

The sirens are nowhere near constant, but they aren’t entirely irregular either. They don’t wake me up when they go off at night, and they’re almost always still novel, and kind of reassuring, even after living in this house for almost 2 years. I don’t know any people who drive them, and I can’t quite tell which sound belongs to which vehicle from which service (although I am getting better at picking it). Yet strangely, they feel like home now.

Where I am currently living is as close to city living as I have ever been. I’m about to get even closer, moving into a flat closer to the CBD and the main thoroughfare in a matter of weeks.

As time ticks away to my move, I begin to wonder: am I a city person now?

I don’t think I am. I still crave being able to look up and see the stars without the glare of millions of streetlights. I still find comfort in the green paddocks that separate Canberra’s haphazard patchwork of suburbs, and I don’t mind that the middle of town doesn’t seem to have any buildings higher than about ten storeys.

But then I hear the sirens. I hear the rumbling of cars going down the avenue out the front of my house. I see the planes humming as they come into the airport. I hear the fireworks from the lake. I wander the streets and find little nooks and alleyways I hadn’t noticed before. I hear my heels clop on Civic’s tiles; I feel the cobblestones of Manuka’s back streets through the thin soles of my flats. I wander into familiar pubs and don’t see a single face I know beyond the bar staff. I taste new things. I hear new things. I read and talk and find places to hide from those whose opinions I find distasteful. I find new people when I cannot find a place to hide. I have discovered so much here, and I have found so much of myself in its grey and in its colour.

But Canberra is a safe city. Its enclaves and cliques, once infiltrated, are warm and comfortable and safe. I want to foster what I have here, but I don’t want to put down roots.

Not yet.

I want to hear more sirens. I want to hear the way the police come to your aid in other countries, the sound of panic in so many languages. I want to listen to hear if the sound of car wheels on asphalt is different in other climates, on different kinds of road.

When I go Home to visit my family, I notice the silence left by the lack of sirens. I wasn’t in this house when my parents lived on acreage, so I can’t compare that silence with the quiet they still have now they live in town. There, the only real noise is the screaming matches the neighbours engage in on a semi-regular basis, but even that can be blocked out with their fancy new roller shutters. It seems strange to be locked in by an invention made for the city in a town of just over 30,000 people.

The quiet of Home doesn’t help me sleep. I miss the drone of occasional traffic. The silence unnerves me now. It reminds me of how I want to run. It makes me want to run back to my City With The Man-Made Lake.

But I’m here now. So why am I thinking of running again, but to somewhere even grander?

I wonder if a bigger city would lull me into the land of slumber better than where I am now. More trains, more cars, more planes, more sirens. Would it be my lullaby, or the soundtrack to newfound insomnia?

I wonder when I’ll find out. I wonder how long I’ll live with it.

I know I will come back here eventually. Back to where the occasional sirens mark my safety. I will always come back to this city I have come to love.

But right now I want to chase the engine to the fire, so that I can throw my soul in and send it flying with the embers, up into the night.