Gold Coast

Last weekend Alan and I went up to the Gold Coast for my brother’s wedding. I flew up on Friday, and then Alan joined me on Saturday (we figured both Hazel and Nanna would cope better if they were eased into the no-parents-around thing; it seemed to work). Apart from a few moments of intense panic (I’m going to miss my flight! This hire car is a manual! My dress is stuck halfway on, and we need to leave in 10 minutes!), the entire trip went very smoothly and ended up being very fun, though exhausting.

It was strange being on the Gold Coast again; I lived there for around 10 months after finishing school, so it’s a bizarre mix of familiar and foreign. While heading to the beach on Saturday morning I found myself on a road I recognised and decided to drive past my old place in Bundall. It was weird. I can think of no other word for it. The Gold Coast seemed prettier than it did when I lived there, although maybe it was always pretty, and I was too self-absorbed and confused to notice it back then (I’ve remembered the Gold Coast as being superficial and awful, but I think now that was just me). Despite its prettiness, I don’t miss living on the Gold Coast. Nor do I miss being 18.

(I do miss Gold Coast radio, though; it acknowledges how awesome music from the late 1990s/early 2000s was by playing LOTS of it. There were at least four songs on the radio over the weekend that I hadn’t heard in yonks, including this one, which I found myself humming and then singing along to while the rest of me tried to figure out what year it must have been big, and how it was that I was able to remember the lyrics:

Also, I was very aware and very appreciative of the fact that I could turn up songs like this without them being interrupted by a little voice from the back saying, “Can we please listen to my music now, Mum?”)

So I arrived on Friday and picked up our snazzy pink hire car (it was tiny! I LOVE driving tiny cars!) and found my accommodation and chatted to our host and when I told her I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept in a bed all on my own and woken up whenever I wanted to, she gasped and said, “I’m so excited for you! Look, I have goosebumps!” (She didn’t actually show me her goosebumps, but I didn’t press it.) And then she ordered me to go to the beach, and I obeyed. I spent a couple of hours wandering at Burleigh and reading my book and listening to a podcast, and then the next morning I slept in until 7am and ate my breakfast while reading in bed, and it was glorious.

And yet. I was reminded of this quote from The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power (on page 2):

“Like a magnet, simultaneously repelled and attracted, to be a mother is to be mired in contradiction. We can love our children while resenting their impact on our lives; our bodies sing out for theirs when we are away from them, yet our minds can strain away in boredom or frustration when they are near.”

After wanting so badly to get away on my own, I’d been gone for less than 2 hours before I noticed myself craving Hazel’s cuddles and wanting to share everything with Mo (Jellyfish! A cool-looking park!). It makes no sense.

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So my little brother (Chris) is married now, which was a big and emotional deal I hadn’t at all prepared myself for, having been preoccupied with organising how to get us up there and finding shoes and earrings and writing lists and packing bags and checking lists and rechecking bags to make sure I’d remembered everything important. It wasn’t until we were at the wedding and the walking-down-the-aisle music started playing that a voice in my head piped up with, “HOLD THE PHONE: My little brother is getting married!” And that’s when I started to bawl. I really should have scheduled in time to think it all through earlier rather getting to the actual day and crying off half of my carefully-applied eyeliner. The wedding was beautiful and Chris looked gorgeously happy, which made me tear up afresh every time I looked at him (and every time I look at their photos now on Facebook). I also have a new sister-in-law now, who I love.

photo by Steph Augustynski

(The chairs are empty because by the end of the ceremony all of the guests were hiding in the shade. It was seriously hot.)

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I do this thing when socialising where I ask a lot of questions of the people I speak to and they talk and talk, and I do this mostly because I’m genuinely interested in who they are and what they’re saying, but it’s also partly a way of me not having to talk about me. And then eventually it becomes a test to see if they’ll notice what I’m up to and turn the focus around for a bit. When they don’t, I take it as a sign that they can’t think of anything to ask me and therefore must find me incredibly boring, and in doing so they confirm everything I already believe: I am not interesting. No one cares. That part of the wedding was less enjoyable, but there was a help-yourself table full of lollies. So. Swings and roundabouts.

Next

from here

My exam high was short-lived; by the end of the next day I’d been crash-tackled by Depression and found myself in exactly the ditch I was in before my study started up again. If Depression leaving was sudden and surprising, his return was even more so. I still feel winded. 

I’d been thinking of postponing applying for Psychology until the June intake next year, so that the majority of the 18 months it takes to complete the course would fall in 2016, when Mo will be at school and Hazel could start some kind of daycare. I thought the time would fly by, and I’d enjoy having the space to read and write and watch things and relax before June turned up, but the days following my exam went by so slowly and painfully and boringly that waiting until June looked impossible, and I started daydreaming about running away so that I wouldn’t have to feel sad and trapped for a single hour longer.

I approached to The Key-Holder to My Freedom (aka Alan) and beseeched him to consider making some sacrifices to allow me to not want to die quite so much, and he said a half yes, and has half taken some steps to half make it happen. It is half progress, and I’m half relieved by it. I’ve applied for the course. I’ve no idea if I’ll get in, or, if I do, whether I will fail miserably at every subject, at which point The Key-Holder to My Freedom (aka Alan) will roll his eyes and say, possibly only implicitly, “Look at the sacrifice I made so that you could fail miserably!”

I don’t know what I’ll do then.

A not-great-book review

I have a confession to make. I cannot handle the writing of a certain author whose surname starts with ’Z’ and ends with ’usak’. (My goodness, it feels so good to let that out.) I think I’m the only person in the world who didn’t like The Book Thief, although I couldn’t remember why, but a friend recently lent me The Messenger, and IT’S ALL COME BACK TO ME: His writing is IRRITATING. I find myself distracted from the story by the way it’s being told; I have to keep stopping and yelling at the book.

“The days and nights come apart. I feel them corroding at the seams,” it says. Yes, that sounds beautiful, but WHAT DOES IT MEEEEEEEAN?!

It also says:

At work that night, it happens.
I find the stones of home.
Or to be honest.
They find me.

SERIOUSLY? Could he not have said all of that on the one line? When did “Or to be honest.” become a valid sentence?! AM I MISSING SOMETHING?!?!

I was going to reread The Book Thief to find out why I felt all “Really?!” whenever people raved about it, but I don’t even know if I can finish this one. Can someone tell me the end? Is it worth it? I’m going nuts.

Podcasts: A Review

from here

I’ve noticed that these days I’m listening to far less music and far more speaking. My default radio station (when Mo’s not in the car) is now ABC local radio, and my iPod spends most of its time playing me conversations and sermons rather than shuffling through the various songs I’ve collected over the years, as it used to. I’m a huge fan of podcasts at the moment, particularly the interview- or conversation-style ones, and I find myself wishing I had the technology to be able to start my own one, so that I, too, would be allowed to ask people deep questions about life without just seeming nosy and weird. (I think I’ll just study psychology instead, for the same reason.) Podcasts, as I’ve said about films in the past, are like free therapy for me. I’m also learning a lot about listening from listening to interviewers listen to others.

“We all want to have a happy life; what’s getting in the way is us. No one’s going to fix that for us except us! Like, if we’re not the ones to look at our problems and say, “I’m actually ready to do what I have to do to get past that” it’s just, it’s never going to happen.” Ben Lee in Wilosophy

I recently discovered The Osher Günsberg Podcast, and have enjoyed the few conversations I’ve heard so far (the episodes with Charlie Pickering and Mia Freedman especially). Osher’s podcast is similar to Wil Anderson’s Wilosophy, although I think I prefer the focus of Wil’s; though the conversations in both podcasts end up covering the same kind of ground (childhood, career, etc.), Wilosophy ends up being more about who people are and why than about what they’ve achieved/are working on. But The Osher Günsberg Podcast has the awesomest theme music for any show of all time, so...

I’ve mentioned Richard Fidler’s Conversations on this blog before, and I’m still a huge fan. I send the episode with Lucy Perry to all my pregnant friends approaching childbirth, and was recently so hooked on Fidler’s interview with Julia Gillard that I felt ripped off when it ended after the usual 50 minutes rather than continuing for hours more. I love that I haven’t heard the names of many of the people interviewed on Conversations, and yet their stories are just as enthralling and inspiring as those told by the people of varying degrees of fame featured in The Osher Günsberg Podcast and Wilosophy; looking at the list of those interviewed by both Wil and Osher, there’s an insinuation of what “interesting” or “successful” or “inspiring” looks like, and it’s nice to be reminded by Fidler that these kinds of stories can be found among us regular, non-celebrity dudes too.

“I think all human beings are a ratio of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, and that for most of us after childhood we think of ourselves as mostly ‘being’ with some ‘becoming’, and when ‘becoming’… takes over…we think of that as a crisis… I think that’s really the glory of the human race… ‘becoming’ is so much at the core of who we are and, you know, I don’t think anybody should write us off. We’re not done yet.” Joy Ladin in On Being

Of all the podcasts I listen to, though, my favourite by far and away is On Being with Krista Tippett, an American radio show that always leaves me feeling like my brain and heart are slightly bigger than they were before I started listening. Two episodes that have particularly stuck with me are Tippett’s conversation with Jennifer Michael Hecht (‘Suicide, and Hope for our Future Selves’), and the one with Joy Ladin (‘Gender and the Syntax of Being’), a transgender woman who transitioned as an adult (her perspective on being a woman after living as a man for so long is fascinating). I am more likely to pause On Being conversations to write down quotes than I am with any other podcast; the guests (and Tippett) are all wise in mind-blowy ways, and I appreciate having my world expanded for that hour-and-a-bit (I always listen to the unedited interviews), especially given that so often right now my world feels small and dull. I can’t recommend the podcast more highly.

”And it’s funny ‘cause my two arguments, that you owe it to other people and that you owe it to your future self, are both about looking at what the individual means, because when you look at a person within a group and all the trends we follow, the clothes, the car, the not car, the every— all these trends that we follow… you realise the extent to which we’re enmeshed. And when you look at yourself and realise that you have fallen in and out of love with the same person, you have fought with friends thinking you’ll never speak to them again and then you love them again – we have different moods that profoundly change our outlook, and it’s not right to let your worst one murder all the others.” Jennifer Michael Hecht in On Being

Have a listen, let me know what you reckon, and offer suggestions if you have any.  Oh, and all of the podcasts I’ve mentioned can be found on iTunes as well as at the pages I’ve linked to. Cleaning the bathroom while listening to a podcast makes the application of bicarb soda and white vinegar so much more bearable, I promise. This is the end of the post. You may not have realised that because I’ve no idea how to end it well and none of these sentences sound very end-y, but it really is.

Exam day

from here

After a week or so of studying in most available moments, my brain was to my notes what one magnet is to another magnet of the same polarity. I therefore decided last night to prioritise sleep over cramming, and jumped into bed at 10pm. Approximately 2.5 minutes later, Moses (who had taken forE.V.E.R to drift off earlier) started whimpering, so I asked him what was up and he said he needed water; I got him some water, told him to go back to sleep, and jumped back into bed. Not long after that he started whimpering again, and I informed him sternly that if he couldn’t sleep he had to lie there quietly while he tried, because everyone else needed sleep and we didn’t want to be disturbed (he sleeps in our room). He responded by throwing up.

This is the third time Mo’s vomited in his life so far, and the first time it’s continued for a bit rather than just being a one-off type thing. Anyway, I won’t bang on about it except to say that as it turns out, I do not cope well with vomit or vomiting people, even if it’s my own child (I’d been hoping that if I ever found myself in a position of having to care for a repeatedly-spewing child that some maternal thing would kick in and override my gag reflex, but no. Let the record show that that did not happen). Fortunately it turns out that Alan’s really good with vomiting people! So hurrah for Team Morrow. Next time I’ll know my job is to run around grabbing towels and remaking the bed and gagging and wringing my hands and feeling useless, because Alan has the soothing and bucket-emptying and cuddling and sheet-washing covered. This is good to know.

Hazel vomited this morning, only once. I had a feeling she might, because Alan had dressed her in a light woollen jumper that had finally made it back into her wardrobe after around 4 months of waiting to be washed (I’ll aim to have it clean and dry again by next winter). Alan thinks Hazel’s brief spew is unrelated to Mo’s and completely coincidental. I think not, even though I’ve no idea what the actual cause was. We’ve agreed to disagree.

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My exam is done! The last time I did an exam was at the end of 2012 (one day before finding out I was pregnant with Hazel, in fact). After that one, I lay down my pen when time was up and thought to myself, “I TOTALLY SMASHED THAT EXAM.” This morning when time was up I lay down my pen and thought to myself, “I think I’ve passed?”

For the rest of the day post-exam I celebrated by having lunch and a cinnamon scroll at the park with Alan, Mo and Hazel, going to the library and then playing soccer at another park with Mo, then heading to the post office to wait around at the post box for the guy to come and empty it because I wasn’t sure if I’d sealed the envelope shut before dropping my exam into it earlier (you may be thinking, how much of what she studied could she have possibly remembered if she couldn’t even say, 3 minutes after putting her exam papers into an envelope and posting it, whether or not she’d sealed that envelope? and I’d reply to you, THAT IS A VERY GOOD QUESTION)(It turns out I had sealed the envelope, if that makes you feel better). We finished off the day by doing blind honey tests, in which we each tasted the two different honeys in our pantry to see if there really was a difference between the cheap one and the expensive one (Alan: There’s no difference except for the price. Me: There IS a difference, and I will prove it to you). I won. (Mo thinks both are yummy.)

And now I’m blogging! Weeeee! And I realise that I was doing that even before my exam, but now I’m blogging sans guilt, and it feels WONDERFUL! I’m off to watch some guilt-free TV and go to bed guilt-free late! Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!