Articles in “Life, the Universe, and Everything”

Since I’ve been downloading images from the camera—and a blog is essentially an exercise in solipsism—I thought I may as well upload some images of flower arrangements from my 30th birthday.

I’m actually not really keen on being given flowers; Nick very rarely does so, although he occasionally bought a pretty bunch when we had a service station next door to us, largely to save them from the petrol fumes.

But flowers make me anxious, because I struggle to keep them alive and each day they get a little more ragged and I get more distressed about my botanical skills.

I think my family knows this, because they rarely send me flowers.

But they clearly felt that a 30th birthday was an occasion, because two bunches arrived.

I’d forgotten about these photos, which were taken 18 months ago, so it’s wonderful to see the arrangements in all their glory.

The first bunch is from my parents.

(Conveniently, this picture also shows my swan-shaped lamp, which I love quite beyond reason. I saw it first on a ridiculously expensive antiques website, and we decided it wasn’t worth the money. When I saw it again—at a much lower price, I might add—on ebay.com six months later, my heart leapt in my chest and I insisted on buying it. I love it every time I look at it.)

These arrived quite early in the day, when I was tidying and decorating the house with the help of my marvellous best friend—who had arrived from Sydney that morning with her less-than-four-months-old younger son in tow, and then not only spent the entire day helping me decorate and cook, but also spent the entire evening running around after people while I drank. Her son, my equally accommodating nephew, spent the night sleeping.

Nick must have been apprised of the imminent arrival of some flowers, because he answered the door and called me to the living room. When I insisted I was busy, he said, “No, you really have to collect this yourself.”

Turned out he was as surprised as anyone, because he’d been expecting this bunch, from my sister and sister-in-law:

(Alas, no swan lamp, but pretty funky curtains.)

It’s strange how not downloading photographs from your digital camera for 18 months can bring on such such a saccharine outpouring of nostalgia, isn’t it?

Blame it on my happy childhood; a happy childhood makes nostalgia a wonderful place to visit.

Nick has claimed for many years that we have too many cushions. In fact, when we were watching a season of Coupling and Steve went into a rant about the uselessness of cushions, Nick couldn’t even meet my eyes.

But I love my cushions. Partly, it’s that I don’t like my sofas. One—salvaged from a share house many moons ago—is brutally uncomfortable, especially now that the foam cushions have reached the couldn’t-bounce-back-even-if-they-wanted-to stage of life. The other two sofas came from a family member’s estate and, while we were and are very grateful for them, they’re shallow with low arms, which means you need cushions to sit on them, given the orientation of the living room.

However, I admit I may have gone too far. I’m attached both to the idea that cushions are a convenient way of adding colour and texture to a room and to symmetry in room furnishings. These two notions have led directly to a cornucopia of cushions, all in neat pairs.

But which ones could I possibly get rid of?

The ones in pseudo-Chinese “silk”: one gold and one a beautiful dark green? Nick bought them for me, so they have sentimental value. (That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.)

The ones that look like someone skinned and stuffed a Muppet? Well, two Muppets, pink and blue. Those are pleasingly furry on cold nights.

The big, square ones shaped like fuzzy dice? Those speak for themselves, surely—as do the furry blue stars.

The retro-patterned blue and red ones made out of the material you get when you turn a tracksuit inside out? One would have to have a heart of stone not to want cushions made of that fabric. Is there anything more comforting than the inside of a tracksuit?

No, I can’t cull my cushions, although I may curse them when I have to tidy up my living room or when Nick gets frustrated and throws them all over the back of the sofa.

The best I can do is not to buy any more.

My family have never done anything special for Mother’s Day, although I believe my sister usually sends flowers these days. Nick’s family do, so we go and buy something pretty and then have a nice family meal.

But every year, the thing I’m most thankful for is that I no longer work as a waitress. Mother’s Day was always the most awful night of the year for waitresses.

The Chinese restaurant I worked at years ago went all out for treats for the customers on special occasions: candied fruit and vegetables for Chinese New Year (I liked the peanuts, which my boss told me would increase fertility. When I expressed a hope that they certainly wouldn’t, she said, “But you won’t have a baby: you’re not married.” Oh . . . yeah, that’s right.); roses for Valentines Day; chocolate eggs for Easter; and buckets and buckets of multi-coloured carnations for Mother’s Day—which arrived in huge bunches, and had to be split into small arrangements and attractively wrapped in cellophane. By the waitresses.

That was the start of it.

Then we’d be booked out for weeks in advance, but would still have to argue with customers about the availability of tables, even though there were only twelve tables in the entire place.

Then there’d be the angry walk-ins, who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t have a table on the busiest night of the year, even though the entire restaurant was packed and they weren’t prepared to wait.

Ah, Mother’s Day—I’m so glad I won’t ever spend another one of you asking, “And what would you like to drink, sir?” and getting patted on the bottom.

Still, I suppose it’s not the worst thing that ever happened in my waitressing years. That would be either the time a man punched out a window because he’d been waiting too long—my fault how, exactly?—or the time a customer hired, without warning us, a stripper for his friend’s 50th birthday.

We had a “no shoes, no shirt—no service” policy.

Maybe we should have made that “no shoes, no shirt, no bra—no service.”

And the friend wasn’t that impressed, either.

Well, you have to start a new tradition somewhere.

Nick and I have had difficult couple of days, so we decided to hit the tequila.

(Of course, once we made that decision, I’d already had half a bottle of wine, hence the title of this post. Nick is dancing to Hunters and Collectors as I type.)

We’ve just been listening to up-beat music and generally chilling out. (And if my 17-year-old students hadn’t already convinced me I was old, my unironic use of the phrase “chilling out” would be all the evidence I need.)

But Nick was also poring over iTunes, which led to the following conversations:

NICK: Scarlett Johanssen’s new single is being previewed. You know I have to listen to that.
ME: Count me out. Her rack’s not that good.
NICK: It kind of is.

He’s right—but I still couldn’t be bothered.

But later:
NICK: I can’t judge whether that was good or not.
ME (from the back verandah, where I was having a cigarette): What?
NICK: It’s a cover of a Tom Waits song.
ME: What?
NICK: Seriously. It’s a whole album of Tom Waits covers.
ME: Really? Even Tom Waits could barely get away with a whole album of Tom Waits songs.

I’ve had a heavy marking load this past three days, as a result of taking a break from my work when family came to visit, so I was exhausted when Nick arrived home. Being the attentive partner that he is, he offered me a glass of wine.

NICK: I think you deserve a glass of the Semillon Chardonnay.
ME: Well, that and the fact the that the Semillon Chardonnay is the only screw-top bottle in the fridge.

There’s something to be said for a partner who considers your needs above his own convenience.

Mind, this Semillon Chardonnay is lovely.

Nick and I have a fairly large number of shared interests, which always make co-habitation a little easier; I’m not always making him watch romantic comedies (although, action-film fan that I am, I did draw the line at Hitman Uncut last night: it was grotesquely violent and exploitative) and he’s not obsessed with sport, so we don’t end up living a life with a horrible resemblance to an American prime-time sit-com.

(Although I am obsessed with sport; well, I’m obsessed with football, anyway. But Nick just ignores the fact that I watch every game of each World Cup and get up at 4.30 a.m. to watch Liverpool win the Champion’s League final.)

But sometimes, our interests seem to diverge more than usual.

For example, I have spent today (after waking at 6.30 a.m.—on a Sunday!—to find that my fan had snapped in half during the night, a stranger than usual occurrence) sitting in the living room marking an enormous pile of assessment.

Nick, on the other hand, has pulled out a borrowed copy of Overlord—which he always describes as “the game written by Rhianna Pratchett”—and has apparently spent most of the afternoon carving a violent swathe through an environment that looks disturbingly like Hobbiton, complete with underground dwellings with round doors.

It’s all right, though; I think these are evil hobbits.

And I get to stop marking soon, so we can get back to our usual Sunday night activities of mocking Robin Hood and squabbling about what we’re going to watch afterwards.

After all, shared interests don’t have to equal perpetual consensus: that would be dull.

The strangest thing happened today, while I was sitting innocently, if belatedly, marking my students’ assessment and occasionally checking my e-mail. I had a browser open, to check some references, and was occasionally brushing a hand over the track pad to stop the computer from going to sleep.

That is, until I heard eerie music—and looked up to find that I’d somehow managed to enter The Church of Scientology’s video channel, and was being informed that it was the only major religion to emerge in the twentieth century via a montage of smiling children.

I think I managed to shut it down before they convinced me of the validity of their beliefs, but I’m going to keep a close eye on myself, just in case I manifest a sudden desire to write large donation cheques.

I find it even stranger that this happened not a week after Nick and I, in company with visiting family, had lunch directly opposite a large anti-Scientology gathering in the city.

For some reason, most of the protestors were wearing V for Vendetta style Guy Fawkes masks, which—while awesome in the film—start to look odder and odder the longer you stare at them.

Especially when several of the people wearing them are also wearing incongruent costumes: call me odd, but I don’t think a Guy Fawkes mask works well with a lime-green Zoot suit and fedora ensemble.

I am, however, starting to wonder why Scientology is suddenly popping up everywhere I look, even when I’m simply trying to eat lunch or mark some assignments.

Spooky.

I’ve already done this recently, with things that have made me happy. But I’m feeling slightly odd, today—partly because I’m intensely tired and partly because I can’t be sure how well I did today with my lecture and tutorials: I seem to have lost the ability to read a room—and I’m frustrated by the fact that I haven’t had a chance to update recently. So cranky it is.

Mildly cranky, mind. Nothing that won’t be cured by a good night’s sleep.

1. Melancholic endings. (This goes for both books and television.)

Happy endings, people. Please? I just want my favourite fictional characters to be happy and healthy. It’s fiction—that’s where we all get to live happily ever after. (I’m living happily ever after already, but for argument’s sake . . .)

Unhappy endings have their own beauty, certainly—but more happy endings, please.

(I suspect the only way to get around this is to read more spoilers, so I know exactly what’s happening. But, really, spoilers just—ironically—spoil everything.)

2. That I need to tidy my living-room again, before my father-in-law comes around for dinner tomorrow night. The coming-around-to-dinner part is fine, but I really don’t want to have to tidy the living room. I’m sure I only tidied it recently.

3. The fact that I’ve just heard “Ode to Joy” on the television, and thought “Hey, it’s that song that South Korean fans sing at football games.” I mean, honestly. I’m sure I used to be cultured once.

(Now I’m reminding myself of the snobby conversation in Bridget Jones’s Diary—the novel—where they suggest that you shouldn’t be allowed to listen to the World Cup theme unless you’d sat through Turandot.)

4. That I’m smoking like a chimney at the moment. Why? No idea. But there you are.

5. I mentioned this at the top, but I seem to have lost the ability to read a room. I’m sure that I used to be able to do this, but I noticed this shift at my prospectus presentation a few years ago, when I egregiously misread the room—there were no consequences, but I was shocked.

I’m not sure why this happened, but it’s throwing me a little.

6. A conversation I had with Nick recently, which he’s forbidden me from blogging about, but the end result is that we’re getting a new television.

(Is it just me, or does that entry make us sound really dysfunctional?)

7. The weather. I know that I put this at the top of my list of things that have made me happy, but now I’ve changed my mind. Where’s the cold weather?

8. The way the sets in Packrat that I haven’t vaulted are really difficult to collect, and I’m having to buy everything—the rats don’t have anything worth stealing, these days.

Oddly, writing the list has made me feel a lot less cranky. Although, I will add one more item, in passing.

9. The fact that Nick has insisted on picking a television programme, and has now just run off, for no apparent reason and without warning, to play on the Internet. This, despite the fact that he now has a device that allows him to surf the Internet from anywhere in the house (and, his new hobby, in bed).

Nope, definitely feel less cranky now. So, having picked the topic of “Things That Make Me Cranky,” I’m going to have to leave the list there, before it becomes apparent that it’s a complete misnomer.

Ah, blog. Is there nothing that you can’t do?

Is that really a surprise to anyone?

Apparently, the engine head is not warped. The mechanic is a little surprised by this, and warns me to keep a close eye on the gauge and check the radiator levels tomorrow and again in a couple of days, but at least we don’t have to replace the engine head.

I apologise, machinery. Apparently, you are capable of generous gestures.

(Once again, this post has no bearing on books or reading. I do have another one half written, but this intervened.)

It has become painfully apparent that my computer and my car have entered into some sort of unholy alliance.

No sooner do I crow that we have managed to defeat the computer’s (or maybe—which amounts to the same thing for the purposes of this rant—the server’s) attempts to shut down dialogue on this blog, than my car gives up the ghost.

Of course, it had to give up the ghost on Coronation Drive in peak hour on a Friday morning, didn’t it? Well done, car, if you were aiming for maximum frustration!

Interesting point: apparently, putting on your hazard lights while steam pours out from under your bonnet is the cue for everyone to start honking, swearing, and gesticulating furiously. I have no idea what they expected me to do—it’s not a very big car, but it’s big enough.

Apparently, it overheated, and I failed to notice. (Well, I did notice—but not until it had stopped.) It can’t have been overheating for long, I suspect, because there really was no warning. The gauge would have shown it was overheating, but the gauge is rather out of my line of sight.

I would have noticed a flashing light, so maybe the manufacturers might want to think about adding one of those.

Or perhaps I should have been paying more attention. Hence my Facebook status update: “seriously unlucky with cars, or remarkably stupid? Or both?”

I’m now waiting for the mechanic to tell me whether the overheating warped the alloy of the engine head. He thinks it did, because there’s oil under the radiator cap, but needs to get the results of my new favourite thing, a “sniffer test.”

I think the head probably is warped, for two reasons.

Firstly, the engine head(s) is one part that is specifically excluded from our Mechanical Service Plan. I mean, it couldn’t just be a problem with the windshield wipers, for once?

(No, wait—that already happened. In a downpour. Late at night. On the Bruce Highway. Yeah, I don’t want that to happen again.)

And, secondly, it’s basically Murphy’s Law, isn’t it? I’m starting to think that’s more powerful than Newton’s and Asimov’s Laws combined, frankly.

Technically, Nick and I are spending quality time together, watching the Melbourne Comedy Gala.

In fact, I’m keeping one eye on the television (which has just shown me an advertisement for The Shield—I had no idea that was still going—and a show that, apparently, “just makes courtroom drama look so good“ called Conviction, which I’ve never heard of) while trying to complete my collection of fancy, absurdly named shoes on Packrat.

Nick, on the other hand, is browsing the iTunes store on his iPhone on the opposite sofa, and keeping an eye out for comedians that he likes.

Mind, we did bond over an Arj Barker skit about buying a new bed. I do love a comedian who can use the word “quagmire” in a skit.

There’s nothing particularly weird about this; this is how we spend many of our evenings.

My mother is constantly surprised by Nick’s tendency to say “Ooh, I’ve just read something really interesting; I“ll send you the link.”

But there’s something appealing to me about the online aspect of the relationship. It’s more permanent, in a way, than phone calls (and useful, should one of us dispute what was originally said).

Plus, there’s no separating Nick from his iPhone right now.

And I only need five more shoes.

1. The weather.

Much as I love living in Brisbane, this is largely in spite of the weather, which is frankly rather like suffering a feverish cold for nine months of the year.

But these cold, crisp nights and warm days are lovely: the best part of Brisbane is its beautiful mild winters.

2. The fact that last night’s Robin Hood did not, in the end, throw out the entire premise of the episode.

Mind you, it was still completely daft.

3. The hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to use the sentence “Join me again next week on this episode of ‘Let’s make no fucking sense’ when I will be waxing an owl” in everyday conversation.

4. The new teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I must admit, though, that this is tinged with a certain degree of wistfulness, since my own years of working in a university have included far more hours of marking and far fewer instances of grappling with Nazis than these movies led me to believe would be the case.

I suppose it’s because I’m not an archaeologist.

5. Reorganising the study, so that one can walk all the way into it and, even more miraculous, actually access all the bookshelves.

On the other hand, the downside of the reorganisation is that I got bored before I had quite finished putting everything back. So there is that.

6. Successfully creating a rhinoceros in Packrat.

Really, success is measured by how low you set your goals in the first place.

However, I did have to sacrifice my kangaroo to do it, and now am unable to find another camel, which is apparently a constituent ingredient of the kangaroo—something that I suspect even Darwin didn’t know.

7. A rather nice 2005 Western Australian Chardonnay clearskin that I found in a local bottleshop.

8. The smug feeling that comes from having made a reasonable dint in my marking.

9. A sudden predilection for painting my toenails a shiny pink.

10. The up-coming season of Doctor Who and my state of ignorance about the plotlines.

11. The fact that new Doctor Who means a new year of Doctor Who nights, the highlight of my social calendar.

12. James Marsters’s appearances in Torchwood.

13. An unusual number of lovely dinners with people I don’t otherwise spend enough time with.

14. Re-starting work on the third of the set of braided rugs for the hallway, and the hope that this means that the rugs might even be finished before we move out of this house (at some unspecified point of time in the future).

What will I do if I move to a house with no hallway?

15. My new pillow.

Which means he will be curiously absent for the next few days.

Apparently, the real benefit of this new gadget is that he’ll be able to surf the Internet from anywhere in the house.

I don’t think he’s quite grasped that I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing. True, I have a laptop, while he’s restricted to his desktop iMistress. But I do at least refrain from surfing the Internet while we’re actually watching television or otherwise spending time together. Nick, on the other hand, has been known to dash off to check his e-mail if I get up to make a cup of tea or nip to the bathroom.

Still, such are the sacrifices one makes when one moves in with a geek.

The closest post office is something of a thorn in our sides.

Partly, this is because the owner seems to run it on a part-time basis. The first time we had to collect a parcel from there, we looked carefully at the collection ticket, which mentioned a 10 a.m. opening for a Saturday, and arrived almost on time. But the sign on the door said it opened at 11 a.m. And the owner himself didn’t turn up until almost noon.

When we taxed him, politely, with the discrepancy between the ticket and the door sign, he mentioned he’d only just bought the place and didn’t want to pay to have all the tickets reprinted.

If I’d known that was an option, I wouldn’t have bothered taking all those takeaway menus home when I worked at the Peking Village, and correcting the solitary typo in front of the television for three evenings. It would have been much easier to just correct people when they came to pay.

Partly, the irritation comes from the fact that we can’t actually figure out the post office’s system. Last time we had a problem with the arrival of a parcel, I rang to ask why some turned up on my doorstep and some had to be collected. The woman spoke a lot about couriers, registered mail, and parcels too big to fit into the letterbox, which I already knew about, but couldn’t explain why my mother’s inexplicable gollywog tea-cosy arrived on my doorstep even though it was a large box sent through the regular post.

I also blame the post office, perhaps unfairly, for the loss of my poor ex-Corolla; if they hadn’t been insisting on a signature for a Nintendo DS game small enough to fit in the mailbox, then my poor car wouldn’t have been parked in the driveway when the Commodore came through the fence.

But today was the last straw, when the owner completely failed to find a parcel that I’d been sent a ticket for. I have no idea why that happens, but it did involve spending twenty minutes waiting in a post office roughly the size of a shoebox, trying to get out of the way of people searching for pre-paid envelopes and occasionally interrupting the man behind the counter to correct his mispronunciation of the name of the (alleged) parcel.

Of course, I say “the last straw,” but, really, what can I do? He can be as lax, as random, and as unprepared as he likes, and we have no way of removing our service—unless we arrange for everything to be sent registered mail.

So we’re stuck with the local post office and its frustrating business practices. I’ll just make sure that I don’t park the car in the driveway before going to pick up any parcels, just in case the bad post-office karma continues.

It’s my mother’s birthday at the end of the week, so I rang my father to remind him (an annual daughterly duty, shared with my sister) and to ask him about what I’d bought.

Unfortunately, I’d gone so far out of my way to find obscure items that I couldn’t pronounce the relevant terms and he couldn’t remember if they were familiar, so that was a bit of a wash-out.

Then we had the following conversation:

DAD (jocularly): Well, thanks for your advice, not that it was much help.
ME: Well, my main advice was good, which was to ask my sister—she’s much better at this stuff. I can help if you want to know about good contemporary fantasy fiction.
DAD: I don’t want to know!
ME: No, I know; I’m just saying I could help. But I don’t really read much detective fiction.
DAD: I don’t know where we went wrong.
ME: Yes, imagine have a highly educated, stable daughter who doesn’t read detective fiction. It’s a tragedy!
DAD: Well, that’s the word I would have used.

There are just too many ways to disappoint your parents. I can’t keep track.