the girl on the bus

This latest piece of writing has me all at sea. Firstly, it’s not like other pieces. They evolved slowly, a spark, an idea, a rough plot. But this. This is a solitary character, dictating to me as I type. She talks and I type. There seems to be no plot, as yet. She’s just talking like a random stranger on a bus, telling me snippets of a life. I don’t know where all the pieces fit, or why.  And yet even as she speaks, I feel she is secondary.

I don’t normally write like this. It’s new and strange and I am not at all  sure it will turn out to be anything viable, at least not yet anyway. I tend to be a write by the seat of my pants kind of gal anyway, but usually I at least know the outcome. (the journey tends to  take me by surprise, but not the beginning or the end. )

 I keep typing though, hoping for iilumination, sooner rather than later.

writers angst

Writing can mess with your head. Seriously. Having only written a handful more words today than I did yesterday, I have sat staring at the screen, my mind working overtime, deconstructing sentences, trying to find where I am coming from.

When I was a kid I used to write stories compulsively. They were always about a girl and her Dad, her mother either having died or runaway. They always lived in shacks and the Dad was always either a farmer or a fisherman. Always.  Looking back, I can see I was dealing with my feelings of abandonment from the men in my life.  (My family details are complex and complicated)

Now as an adult, I find myself writing about women. relationships between mothers, daughters, sisters and friends.  I have strange relationships with my sisters. I don’t have a relationship at all with my mother and my relationship with my daughter is probably the only healthy female relationship within the familial confines that I have.

Which puts me in a pickle. Because no matter what I write, there’s so much of myself staring back at me from the page that I find it startling.  And a little unnerving.

Is it always necessary to sacrifice a small piece of yourself for your art? It’s a painful experience. To pour your blood onto the page.

well, let the blood run free.

1000 a day or die

I’m still sick. I have been oozing seven shades of mucos and hacking up my left lung for what feels like days now, with no end in sight. And somehow yesterday whilst curled in on myself on the lounge with a hot mug of tea and a book, I was actually inspired. 

I dragged out the laptop and my fingers flew at the speed of a fast snail (which is break neck speed when your head is full of sinus congestion and a thousand tiny red hot hammers pounding away)

But I did it. I wrote 1100 words and the best part is I like them all. I don’t know what they are a part of, or where exactly they fit in, but it’s there, finally, bubbling just beneath the surface breaking free in mini spurts between body wracking spasms.

 I only hope I can finish before I am well, or at least hold onto the cloudiness in my head so the words can free fall until I am done.  If not, I’ll get my small boy to breathe all over me. “Come make mummy sick so she can write…” Now there’s a writing method that warrants some examination.

Stuffy sinus stutterings (todays post brought to you by alliteration)

There is nothing like a hot pot of tea, flannel jammies, big socks and a blankie when you feel like death warmed up.  With the better part of the night spent tossing and turning in pain and the feeling that your nose was going to explode spraying mucos in seven different shades from it all over the bed, when I was awoken by the radio this morning I couldn’t even muster the strength to hit snooze.

Today I thank my stars I am merely a stay at home suburban Mum. After waving from the confines of the couch to my two oldest as they charged off to the bus stop, and a quick snuggle from my youngest (who thankfully can make his own breakfast and can use a remote in that deft manner in which only those with a y chromosone can) I poured myself a cup of tea and curled up with Mr.Love, my favourite bear purchased for me by my favourite man.

So, I am off to drown myself in Pay Tv and tea while a hack up a lung.

when what you wanted turns out to be shit

Two carboard boxes sit patiently in my study waiting for me to take them back to where they came from. In short, I am extremely unhappy. Sad even.

It all started many many moons ago. Back when I only had two children (and a smaller backside).  My son was born with a rare abnormality. I needed to know more. So I begged and pleaded and I was allowed to get the internet.  (This is 1999) We got bigpond. BIG mistake. We lived on the outskirts of a major city. But our internet connection, was dodgy at best, non-existant any other time. So we cancelled it. Around 2002, we thought we’d try again. This time we went with AOL and have been happy dial-up customers since.  but I want broadband.

Greedy little goat aren’t I?  Finally after years of pleading, cajoling, pouting, making promises  not fit for a PG13 veiwing and just generally being a pain in my husbands arse, he gave me the all clear to get broadband.

My little box arrived and I unwrapped it with glee. OMG wires much? It was horrible. I use the laptop at the kitchen bench because it’s the only phone outlet, I could not have a broadband modem and fifty freaking wires littering my tiny kitchen bench. So I requested WiFi. The box arrived two days ago, I was so giddy.

I set it all up and went to log into My Bigpond. A big fat nothing happened! I rang, and after talking to Craig for an hour (who has the hots for his boss) he decided there must be something wrong with my laptop.  I should also state that whilst I could get on the net and browse and that I could log into this here blog, I couldn’t post anything. I could read blogs, and read my own, but I couldn’t use any active features. And this seemed to be true every where.

So I jammed the wireless thingy in the PC, (which has no access to a phone line which is why we wanted wireless broadband in the first place) and the same thing happened on it, which made me question Craig’s theory of my Laptop being on the fritz.)

So i rang bigpond yet again, spent half an hour talking to Michael and he told me others were having problems logging into my bigpond but no one had complained of not being able to access other components of other sites.

So this morning I did a little experiment, my dial up connection works fine. Bigpond has just lost a customer. And I am probably never going to convince myhusband to get an updated version of internet access until dial up becomes defunct.

*sigh*

sometimes, the internet sucks.  

Don’t poo poo on my apocolypse

I’m not entirely convinced about Global Warming. I just find it all seriously funky. Maybe someday, when more conclusive evidence based on actual data as opposed to “models of what might happen” comes to light, perhaps I’ll be more on the GW bandwagon.

Having said that, being ecologically friendly is something I think every body should take on board. Carbon footprints aside, I ask you, what about our serious problem as a disposable society? Where the hell are we supposed to keep putting this crap we throw away without a second thought? My biggest beef is probably disposable nappies. I loathe those things and they DO NOT break down. (Unless you fork out the bucks for eco-bots.)

I know they are convenient. I know sometimes, babies have reactions to cloth nappies. (Sometimes it’s because they are sensitive to a particular type of cloth nappy, there are more than one. My kids did not like the terri-towel style ones, but the flannel was wonderful.Sometimes it’s what we wash them in that’s the problem) But seriously, if you think about how many disposable nappies you use on one baby throughout its journey to potty training…..times that by however many babies there are out there….and just try to imagine all those nappies in a landfill somewhere….factor in that most disposable nappies DO NOT break down, they will still be there 100 years from now….what are we going to do? Make a pyramid of them and name it one of the sevens wonders of the futuristic world?

If Al Gore wants a great scaremongering campaign to prop up his fledging political career  celebrity profile (I say that loosely) then why not focus on the rise of the killer nappies? We are choking our world with plastic wrapped baby ass funk.

I find that far more frightening than the hypothesis that the earth is warming and we are all going to die. (Of course we are, December 21, 2012. So long as we all clear our schedules, we are penciled in for annihilation.)

I wonder, can preserved baby poop survive the apocalypse?

waiting for rain

Somewhere in the dark cobwebby regions of my infrequently used brain there are coherant and seemingly intelligent thoughts that sit brewing like storm clouds ready to burst….

I wish it would happen soon.

Rhetorically Speaking……kind of.

I’ve spent the day contemplating this space. What belongs here? What doesn’t? Should it be a space dedicated to the mundanity, a monotonous drone of how I filled my day, third grade style? (And then I…)  Or should I try for witty and humourous? I think I am hillarious, although I find my husband infinately more amusing and I am loathe to turn this space into a box of quips  and mockery all slewn in my husbands general direction.

Should I try to be opinionated? Air my political views to the circling masses for dissection, leaving myself open to be carrion for the cyber-vultures? How exactly does one express her political views when she is neither right nor left wing?  Nor entirely sure of what being one or the other really entails.

I’m not really very interesting. I suspect I was once upon a time. A time before womb raiders, swollen breasts and sleepless nights stole my personality and left this substandard stepford in her place.

So what does one put out there into the ether?

lost in suburbia

Outside my front door is uniform chaos. An untidy little street, crooked and jagged that zigzags through suburbia like a fracture. Here all the streets are circular, loops that intersect and perform pirouette’s around three suburbs. The shortest distance is a straight line between two points, but nothing here is ever straight. Nothing.

 

In this place, I am reminded of other places. Other pieces of suburbia. Pieces I have lived and shed, only to find them somewhere else and slip them back on like a pair of favourite jeans, they’re frayed, see through in the arse, have holes and smell slightly mouldy, but you still can’t bare to throw them out.

 

This is my life. I shed suburbs like a semi-urban serpent. I slither from suburb to suburb, different towns, different states. I watch tv and see a false suburbia. One where every body knows everybody.  A surburbia of my youth. I know it does exist. But it’s unattainable for the likes of me and mine. We are gypsies. Military transients who slip from town to town with stealth like precision. We move in and out before you even know our names.

 

I grew up in a small town. The kind where people don’t lock their doors. There’s no need. No one sane would ever venture that far out into the bush.

 

My father instilled suburbia in my veins. Holidays spent with him remind me there are places like tv. Streets where every body knows each other. And every body stops to say hello. Streets that are straight and orderly. Where they all layout nicely like a grid. Soldiers of mortar and brick all standing strong, resolute and to attention.

 

I think that’s why I like it here. It’s fractured. Streets are broken and bent. It’s spontaneous. No grid lines. No Truman show. Just 20 paces east, a hop, skip and a jump north, 14 paces west and a leap south. There ‘X’ marks the spot.

Spontenaity at its finest.

And for a gypsy like me, spontaneous is home.