Tag: Life in Oz

It has been a VERY long weekend.

From blind dates to lost dogs, movies with sisters, drinks with friends, pub crawls, drunken falls, sprained ankles, frustrating lockouts, more drinks, a Girltalk concert, Oxford St clubs, waterskiing on the harbour, Australia Day bbqs, more beer, and a creamy pavlova – all since my last post.

We found our dog after hours of search and worry. My real estate let me into my apartment after hours of impatient waiting. My ankle is sore and swollen but feeling better no thanks to my abusive dancing the next night and waterskiing the day after that. It was a long weekend but it was an awesome one.

On reflection, it has actually been a very long holiday.

Ever since I moved to the city I have justified almost every invitation as “making up for the last two years of my twenties spent living like I was in my eighties” and anyway, “I’m on holidays” right?

But when are my holidays going to end? Seeing as I don’t plan to officially be at uni till mid-year, it is really up to me…

It’s been fun. I’ve had enough alcohol, sugar and fatty foods to last the rest of the year. I’ve had a great summer. I love my new life in the city. But I have now landed at that point where enough is enough.

I’m ready go back to work. I’m ready to find some pilates classes to teach. I’m ready to get started on uni readings and work long and hard on my other projects. I am looking forward to getting my body back in top form – and I’m hoping a bikini catalogue in March will provide the motivation to make it happen.

As ready as I am and as much as I want to start it all right away, I can’t.

I have friends to come over for a housewarming/pub crawl this Friday – so I can’t give up alcohol quite yet. I have a sprained ankle so I can’t get fit or start teaching pilates quite yet. And I’m a bit tired from the weekend’s ordeal so I’m not sure how productive my mind is going to be. And there’s still too much chocolate in my house.

February. I’ll start in February. Just a few days to go… may as well live out the holiday mode till then.

How would it feel to have consciousness without a brain?

Check out these flowers! My cousins gave them to me sometime between Christmas and New Year when they popped by to check out my new home. I didn’t have a large vase so we hunted around for something and settled on the empty cachaca bottle awaiting me to put it in recycling. I’m not the best with changing water on flowers, or watering plants for that matter, and look what I discovered!

Flowers like alcohol!

It makes them all genki and happy and stuff.

The flowers in the water diluted ever so little with a remaining drop of cachaca (the best spirit in the world – that comes from Brazil) look like they’re going to last forever, while the ones in the glass are whithering away. And the water with alcohol stays clean too – I’ve only changed the water in the Cachaca bottle once, while the small vase that had the left-over flowers in it has constantly gone mildewy and needed changing many-a-times.

What does this mean?

Do flowers have a consciousness and are they high on this water??!

Should I be feeding my plants a drop of spirits too?

Can alcohol have similar life-extending benefits for me too?

Or is it just making the dying process a more enjoyable one?

Either way… another bottle of cachaca please!!!

Sometimes I walk with music playing in my ears, sometimes I walk reading a book or editing parts of my own writings, and sometimes I walk with no phone, no music, no book – nothing. The later is my favourite – that’s where I get my most inspiring thoughts.

Sometimes when I walk with nothing, I pay conscious attention to sounds, to the music of the streets. To the cars that drive passed, to the birds in the sky, to the machinery and hammering – to the fact that at times you can walk for hours through fairly busy streets and hear almost zero human voices. Yesterday the only voice I heard was my own – when I complimented someone’s teddy-bear-faced dog. Another day it was just a woman siting in a car talking on her phone.

I hear plenty of music – from other people’s ipods – and I do tend to wonder how such a volume will affect their hearing. I even notice that couples walking together don’t say much – at least not as they pass another person. Sometimes you see lips moving from afar, but as you approach they close them tight – I’m not quite sure why. Some people walk with a smile, some people walk with a frown, some people seem happy, some angry, some sad. I throw a smile when it feels appropriate, or some positive energy their way when it doesn’t. Sometimes I get it wrong and I smile and get a frown in return – as if they have never seen a person smile before. And sometimes after the first initial shock, they smile back.

And again this morning, with nothing in my hands and nothing in my ears I walked to a nearby park – one I hadn’t heard of till my friend recommended it yesterday.

A park? Hmmm… a tropical rainforest seems more appropriate. Somehow as you walk through Cooper Park, your eyes able to look at nothing but tall trees, large caves, a small prehistoric creek, green moss and sunshine filtering through in between. It makes you wonder how it can be possible that this is, in fact, in the middle of a busy buzzing city. It’s like a half-a-square-kilometre of the Daintree has miraculously been uprooted and replanted, capturing the history and the energy with it. It will definitely be one of my regulars – and there seem to be many different little paths you can choose – today I took the Rosewood Walk, and maybe tomorrow I can do the Peppermint Walk. There’s even the cutest little bridge called Moon Bridge that goes over Cooper Creek, a trickle of water that is said to follow ‘the line of a volcanic dyke of Jurassic age.’ Sounds pretty cool, even if I’m not quite sure what a volcanic “dyke” is.

Someone told me that the park used to be a secret sanctuary for women – no men allowed. I like this idea – men have it with their Free Masons and secret mens clubs – so power to the women I say. Whoever came up with the secret female facebook status the other day was pretty brilliant – did you notice it? It took the boys I know a while to catch on to the meaning. (We all put a colour as our status. It was for breast cancer awareness, so take a guess what those colours meant.) A few boys had colours as their status too – I wonder if they figured it out yet…

Anyway I did some research about Cooper Park, and I can’t find anything about secret women’s clubs. I did learn on the Woollahra Council website that the original owners were two Aboriginal clans, the Cadigal and the Birrabirralah, who during 1789 half the populations was killed by disease brought by European settlers. The website also talked about an Aboriginal rock engraving of a fish and one of ship and men, so I’ll have to hunt them out next time I’m there.

The best thing about this park is that dogs are allowed (they are forbidden from the bush walk I used to do in Frenchs Forest)… and they are even allowed of the leash in certain areas. Now all I need is a dog.

Oh, and there are some tennis courts inside this little haven too. Anyone up for a hit?

Note – there are disadvantages when it comes to choosing not to take a phone on a long walk… no phone = no phone calls and no photos. So the picture above is one a took two years ago in Queenstown, New Zealand.

One minute I’m out, the next I’m at home. No more driving hours to see my friends. Now I just walk. No more “designated driver” (hence water above) – no doubt I love living in the city.

But… since the “moving in” hype along with Christmas and New Year celebrations has finished, I have to say I miss a lot about my suburban life. I don’t want to go back there or anything, but I do miss it. A lot. I miss the quiet streets and the comfort I had walking around in more-or-less my pyjamas – which I don’t quite feel comfortable walking down Oxford Street in. I miss saying good morning to my mum and sisters as I pick up Bella, my sister’s schipperke, in the morning so that she can sit on my lap for the rest of the day. And more than anything I miss my Opa.

I miss his sense of humour. I miss his bright eyes. I miss looking after him, buying his groceries, cooking him dinner. Most of all I miss his company. I miss watching the news with him – I don’t think I’ve watched a single piece of news since he passed. I miss having him in the room, reading his paper as I do my writing and read my books. I miss drinking cups of tea, making his coffee with endless amounts of sugar and cream. I miss his insights into life – it’s shortness, it’s joys, it’s true meaning. I shed a tear for him every day. Today it’s been many. As time goes on it seems to be getting worse, not better. Maybe because “normality” is setting in. I’m going back to writing the book I wanted to finish writing while I was at his house. But now I’m not there. And neither is he.

I’m still receiving my Carer’s Pension, for the 14-weeks that follow his death. I’m trying to see this as his gift to me – as if there weren’t a enough already. But I’m trying to see this as the justification for me to not work for what must be another eight or so weeks. But it’s not easy. Not when I’m used to juggling hundreds of responsibilities and deadlines. How do you do that? How do you focus just on ONE thing???

But I will try. For him I will try. And for him I know I will succeed. I want to share this video of him, but I’m struggling to get the VOB file converted to youtube files… This may show some of the video, but not sure…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8U6KVYfgjk[/youtube]

My favourite part was when my uncle asked, “If the whole world could see you now, what message would you have for them?”

And my Opa replied: “My message would be, first try to make peace everywhere. Instead of bashing each other up. With all these terrorists, there is no more love in the world. The world will go to pieces, I tell you that.”

You’d never guess I’m his granddaughter hey…

My second favourite was when my uncle asked him to “smile for five seconds” to which after about three seconds of showing big grin he laughed and said: “My dentures will fall out now.”

😀

Anyway now after watching him on the video, and writing this, I feel a bit better. I am happy to be where I am, in my new home, and I know I’ll carry my Opa with me where-ever I go.

I’m revisiting one of my favourite books to type up some quotes, and I thought I’d share a few with you. Next time you have a spare chunk of time on your hands, I encourage you to read this incredible true story of Gregory David Roberts, a man who escaped an Australian prison and lived in a slum in Bombay, works for the underground and gains incredible insights into humanity, and our place in the universe.

“No happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.” (Roberts 2007:129)

“Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.” (Roberts 2007:215)

“Justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us…  justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.” (Roberts 2007:229)

It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would have annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive. (Roberts 2007:370)

Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end. (Roberts 2007:426)

Greed without control, or control without greed won’t give you a black market. Men can be greedy for the profit made from, let’s say pastries, but if there isn’t strict control on the baking of pastries, there won’t be a black market for apple strudel. And the government has very strict controls on the disposal of sewage, but without greed for profit from sewage, there won’t be a black market for shit. When greed meets control, you get a black market. (Roberts 2007:446)

There’s a little arrogance at the heart of every better self… and there’s an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve. (Roberts 2007: 451)

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love. (Roberts 2007:471)

“So that’s it,” he concluded. “The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!” … This set of number is the cause of empire and rebellion. This is the formula that has generated our civilisations for the last ten thousand years. This built the pyramids. This launched your Crusades. This put the world at war, and this formula has the power to impose the peace.(Roberts 2007:350)

Is it possible to change this to: One million peaceful man, ten million smart men, one million confident men, and six billion people who do what’s right rather than what they are told.

It all comes down to changing: evil to peace, stupid to smart, coward to confident, and ignorant to aware. It almost makes a turn for peace sound simple…

If you haven’t read this book, I recommend you do!

Roberts, Gregory David, Shantaram : A Novel (Sydney: Picador, 2007). And more of his philosophies at: www.shantaram.com

I can’t remember who or when someone told me to look this up but today on this rainy summer’s day besides enjoying calm pitter patter,working on my book, and sending a few happy new year messages, I have been looking up green porn. Soooo funny! Get on you tube and you can find many more of these short little clips by Sundance Channel.

Glad I don’t have to eat a male’s head… well, ok, I’m not going to go say anything more about that. The praying mantis:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXoPLeIIUFY[/youtube]

Sadistic snails:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BckqviVaWl0[/youtube]