cookie cutter world

Soon the boxes will arrive. Neat little boxes in which to pack my entire life.

To say I cannot wait to move is an understatement. My feet are itchy and I need to move. I have outgrown this piece of suburbia and need to feel new grass beneath my feet.

My family comes in fluctutations this week. One child away at camp, the husband away at work, a sleep over and a child curled on the couch playing hookey from school. They all pass each other like ships in the night. And yet I remain. Always here, never there, never going, never gone.  Sometimes I tire of being the known constant….just once in a while I would love to be the unknown integer…..

food for thought….send me an email about your sexual experiences with members of the same sex, or an email of why you never could go there. Or your fantasies you would never fulfill and why.  pierah@aol.com

Hellooooo, is there anybody in there?

OMG, it’s been forever. 

I had actually forgotten I possessed a blog….I know, it takes a special kind of stupid to forget (and yes I am qualified, I am  amongst that very special breed of women who forget to eat….so tar me with the special-stupid brush and let us move on)

What have I been doing? Ugh, I wish I had something other to say than the post-teenage wangst/ possible midlife crisis crap that is about to spew out into the intarwebs like aunt Flossies dirty washing, so please, if you are not given to the dramatics every once in awhile, now would be the time to avert your eyes, and go clip your toenails or pour yourself a glass of wine and sort through the overstuffed filing cabinet in the study.

The boy is still experiencing issues with his bowels. Three weeks of persistant diarreah (or diarick as my six year old calls it) has seen us back at the Doctors surgery and another round of testing under way. Should have results by tuesday.  But boy, that’s one thing they don’t put in the job description for “Mummy”.  It took me 13 hours to get a stool sample from my ten year old. He would forget and flush after he was done….motherhood….so very G L A M O R O U S….(thankyou Fergie, I will never forget how to spell glamorous as long as I live.)

I have a girl-child in the throws of puberty. If I find the hormone fairy, I swear I will snap her fucking hormone activating wand and shove it up her glittery ass. Sideways. 

My husband has been away much of the past few months with work. He’s home now for a few months. Thankfully.  We celebrated our 14 th anniversary seperately. He at work fending off advances from men on Oxford street (I did warn him he was too pretty to wander the streets alone after dark)  me fending off advances from an ex boyfriend who simply cannot live with out me.  WTF? Dude. it’s been 15years. No I will not run away with you to Rome. (As tempting as that may be)

When the hell did I become THAT woman?  he is persistant and stubborn and not thinking clearly. And because I care about him I am probably a little more gentle with his heart than I should be.

I am down a dog, since the female dog took to biting the ten year old. I am not sure why. I never wanted the second dog to begin with, but the husband will look at me with those pretty blue eyes and pouting his kissable lips and say pretty please in a way that I simply cannot say no to. I mean our cat thinks he’s a dog anyway. Seriously. The bloody thing comes when you whistle.  ( I love my cat)

On top of it all, I believe I have gone temporarily insane. As the husband and I seriously consider and persue homeschooling our children for the next two years. We have an interstate move…again. Which sees the switching of grades, curriculum and the fifth school in the last five years that my daughter will have to be the new kid at yet again. The upside, I can indulge my inner snob and teach them cool subjects like Latin, I just wish I could find a secular latin programme I was comfortable with. 

so there you have it.

Let the madness begin…..

Mother is a mchine

This afternoon a miracle occured. I mean a real bonafide miracle. Not just the insane ramblings of a woman hocked up on antihistamines trying to get through the school holidays with grace and dignity and all three children still containing their limbs and breathing abilities, but the real McCoy, walking on water, parting the sea, turning water to wine kind of deal.

Unfortunately the miracle that occured did not contain a long lost Daddy Wharbucks, or the floor of my sons bedroom becoming visible; nor did my ass suddenly regain it’s former glory and lift itself from banging against the backs of my knees; but a girl has her right to a fantasy or two…..

What did happen was this.

A few months ago, I got WiFi broadband. It lasted two days. Whilst I could connect to the internet, I couldn’t actually DO anything on it. I couldn’t log into my account, I couldn’t even log into ebay. So I pulled it all apart and sent it back to telstra with a big thanks but no thanks.

A month later, I recieved a bill. For $470. (The modem and the early termination of contract fee.) I couldn’t believe it. Not only had I sent the modem back, I had the service for two days! I was outraged. Especially considering that I only signed up because the guy flogging bigpond to me specifically said I had ten days in which I could peruse and then terminate should I choose. Of course there is a lesson in there on not taking anything at face value and actually reading the TOS. (Red face moment there, I should know better)

To cut a long story and several tirades short, I recieved an outstanding notice today. Because I had paid the phone and mobile bills, but not the bigpond bill (I was contesting, I sent the modem back, there was no way I was paying for it and I figured I had no choice with the ETF, but the ETF wasn’t due until tomorrow anyway.) there was an outstanding debt. It didn’t state it was a bigpond issue, it was just an amount. So I called Telstra. Because aside from the bigpond charges, my bills were up to date. I have issues with bills, I cannot have overdue notices, they induce insomnia- so generally my bills are always paid either well before or on the date they are due.

It must have been my lucky day because I got Kelly. Kelly was wonderful. She went through the last three bills with me, item by item and amazingly took my anal retention in her stride. She managed to do the unthinkable. She reduced a $710 bill to a mere $236!! She tracked down the modem I had sent back, she even had my ETF taken care of. In short, Kelly restored my faith in Telstra. Big corporations are generally machines, with no ethics or thought of the people who pay for their services, their sole obssession profit margins and top dollar for shareholders. Finally, some common sense prevailed. Someone actually decided that charging a woman $330 for terminating a service she had for two days was ridiculous.

See, bona fide miracle. Thank you Kelly. Telstra is lucky to have you.

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.

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?