mobile phones and toilet cubicles

Doesn’t seen like those two things go together? Yes, I thought so too, but I was willing to test the concept. You know me, open minded as a very open-minded thing.

Imagine this. I’m at work and need to visit the euphemism. It happens. It’s why euphemisms are provided in the workplace, I believe.

I walked in and there’s a lady on the phone. A workmate lady. She turns around and acknowledges me then keeps talking. I figure she’ll finish the conversation and leave. But no…

I’m in the cube. I hear “Oh, and happy birthday, by the way!”  Then more information about birthday-related stuff.

“Nice,” I think. She’s just doing the obligatory Happy Birthday thing and then she’ll hang up and leave.

By this time, reader, I am in the cubicle and ready to wee.

[Sorry if this is too graphic for you but that's probably about as bad as it gets in this post.]

Then, she starts on about hand towels. Seriously. A new conversation. We’ve moved on from the birthday greetings to hand towels???

I suddenly had this strange sensation of being on a tram. On public transport with my undies down [sorry, there's no other way to say it]

I had a meeting to go to, and desperate need to relieve myself. And I was frozen, anxious, unable to perform due to some deap seated fear of weeing in public. So I took matters into my own hands and said “Excuse me, this isn’t working.”

[It's really hard to figure out what to say at those times, it was the best I could do.]

Her response? “Would you like me to leave?”

My retort ? “Yes please.”

And out she went.

Ye gods.

The results are in: mobile phones and toilet cubicles do not go together!

Joan and George have something to say…

The horse-riding statues outside the State Library of Victoria have had notes slung over them overnight. Joan: Skiing causes more deaths than swine flu. George: More people have died from rocking vending machines (interesting thought) than from swine flu.

What masked (or unmasked, only the security cameras can tell) bandits have perpetrated this heinous act of truth-telling? I have taken a photo but in life’s ongoing struggle for interconnectivity between boxes of chips, now need to find a cable to transfer photo from phone to pc to blog…

plover

Popped out just now for a bit of the ole drunken boat at Bennetts with the Allan Browne Quintet. I know I have the CD at home, and I know it almost by heart, but live is good for the soul, which has taken a bit of a battering this weekend.

I heard a new song they were trying out before they started with the boat: ‘A life too light’, something launched from Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’. In Eugene Ball’s trumpet I heard the cry of a solitary plover on the edge of lonely grasslands.

All is well.

T&L Royalty Statement

It’s May, so it’s royalties month!  Every six months I get a royalty statement from the publisher for Tristessa & Lucido. Tells me all the money I earned from sales of the book in bookshops. Hah!  About $25 this year so far. Annually I get a PLR statement from the Public Lending Rights people. This one tells me all the money I earned from lending rights collected when people borrow my novel from the library. About $200 this year. And of course I never get any statements or royalties from second hand bookshops. It’s a funny old world.

Inter alia

Okay, the title is a long shot, but what the hey. I mis-heard the name of the coffee shop that Ian (the designer of extempore) took me to. I thought he said St Alia… so then I thought it would be clever to name the blog inter alia and then I checked and the coffee shop is called St Ali.  Bugger. But anyway.

There are many things to recommend this coffee shop.

For one thing, I have friends that go there already. Tick.  And it’s hard to find. Always a plus to know a secret place! (not so secret of course, it was chockers, but hidden doorways are wonderful). Tick again!  And of course there’s the breakfast-all-day thing. Plus one of the breakfasts includes eggs with wholemeal soldiers. It’s healthy to revisit childhood every now and then. Tick tick tick.They roast their own coffee, the food is good, the service is friendly, the decor is interesting… and on it goes.

The poached eggs on zucchini, with haloumi and beetroot dip was really good. And Ian’s insights about John Cage and silence were up to his usual standard of interestingness… and the macchiato (pictured) was a winner… Nothing like a heart in the froth of a lunchtime coffee to make a girl feel good about the afternoon.

Vermouth

Thanks to my friend B, who first introduced me to the Clunes Book Town event last year. She invited me to go with her again this year and I took the day off. Yes reader, a day away from email; away from the computer; away from extempore. A little drive in the country on a late autumn Sunday and chance to browse through thousands of second-hand books.

A highlight of the day was the panel discussion… Well actually Frank Moorhouse was the highlight. Me, who never asks authors to sign books, asked him to sign the copy of Martini: a memoir. I was a little entranced by the man, I guess. He does have a presence. And he talked about the absence of domesticated intimacy in a way that showed he understood a particular kind of loneliness. Hard to resist.

The book was even better.  While the martini could be considered a vehicle for an exploration of certain encounters and niggling unanswered questions in Moorhouse’s own past, I found the martini bits most interesting and particularly the tone of conversations with friend Voltz. These are the sorts of conversations that matter.The serious conversations about what to do with the olive pip. I am not being facetious here. There are few questions as able to get to the core of things as this one.

I was introduced to the martini by my friend J in Provincetown, MA in the USA. The best martinis I have had ‘out’  (i.e. not at J’s house) have been Fanizzi’s and also at The Mews, also in Provincetown. One night in 2004, when my heart had been broken by long distance telephone and I felt desolate, C took me there.  After just two little vodka martinis, he and I skipped down Commercial Street to the The Squealing Pig.

Tonight, on the way home from the gym, I bought a bottle of Noilly Prat. There is always vodka in the freezer. I take my martinis with vodka.  5 vodka to 1 vermouth, chilled. Shaken. 3 green olives on a toothpick. Sipping it as I write this.

Thanks to J, thanks to Frank Moorhouse. Thanks to C, who left me at The Pig (he had other fishies to fry) and I ended up being driven home by M. Oh happy days.

What will I do with the olive pips?

Two men on a tram

We are so vulnerable in the mornings, when we get on the tram. Our hearts are open even if our minds are sleepy. And speaking for myself, I just want to be left alone… I don’t want tinny little iPod noises from people who let their own need to remove themselves from their realities leak into my own peaceful morning. I don’t want to overhear this end of endless pointless telephone conversations.

Worse than iPods and mobile telephone calls, I have discovered this week, is the angry chewer. I haven’t been terribly consistent with my tram times so it’s not like he’s on the same tram every morning. Somehow his inconsistencies and mine have put us on the same tram twice now. And our consistencies have us both sitting up the back of the tram. He is so effing LOUD that I can hear him over everybody’s iPod and mobile phone conversation! Chewing with his mouth open, yes but with a bit more than that. He chews angrily. With is eyes sort of glazey. He’s a machine. Wet chewing sounds from a machine. Uggh. Double Uggh.

The other funny thing that’s happened is that both times I’ve had the angry chewer on the tram, we’ve had to change trams at Kew depot. “Er, ladies and gentlemen, we have a defective tram and I’ll have to ask you to get off this tram and take the one in front.”

Okey dokey.

During the tram changes, I’ve managed to move away from him - but not so far away that I couldn’t fix him with a baleful stare from wherever it was. Because of course, that will help, won’t it. A baleful stare can really create change for good in the world on a Wednesday morning! What I really want to do is go up to him and tell him to shut his mouth while he’s chewing. I resist the urge.

And then a funny thing happens. An old man gets on the tram at St Vincents Plaza.  He’s making a noise. It’s almost like Buddhist throat singing. A motorcycle goes past and it seems like they are at the same frequency. For a moment the man’s throat noise is the same as the motorcycle engine. I’m sitting right behind him and I feel like through the seats I can feel that he is scared and that this noise he makes is a way to keep things at bay. Then I’m standing, at Spring Street, ready to get off at 101 Collins.  I’m standing behind his seat. A clear thought comes into my mind, and I follow the impulse, putting my hand on his shoulder before I get off. As the tram slows he looks up and I smile at him. His eyes are watery and faded and this weird thank you thing happens. He’s thanking me and I’m telling him it’s alright. And this is all on a tram on a Wednesday morning, with angry chewing man frantically exercising his jaw at the other end of the tram.

There’s no really purpose to this story; it’s just a short description of two little encounters. I only mention them here because they have stuck in my mind and I’m carrying those two blokes around with me everywhere at the moment.

and this today, on resonate

Today on the Australian Music Centre’s online magazine resonate: ‘Fools rush in…‘

Blogging [jazz] again…

Can I cheat, and blog here to say that I’m blogging there?  Well there, I did it.

Just keep working

A tidbit from my chiropractor this morning, in the slightly surreal circumstance of having my back adjusted in the ‘consulting room without doors’ that we use for early appointments… ['back' story {pun indadvertent but too good to remove!} is that my adjustments go better with the moving table than manually and the table is downstairs in full view of the reception area and normally used by the other practitioner at this location so I go early early early in the morning, when it's still dark and feel a sense of strangeness having the work done in an empty open area...]

But anyway…

What he said, in response to some comment I made about the frustrations of slow improvement in my yoga class, was that if you keep working at it, you do achieve success. Just keep working at it. A small but profound gem… and it struck me particularly because I’ve been reading a book called ‘This is Your Brain On Music‘ by Daniel J Levitin and on becoming an expert, he says that 10,000 hours of practice is required for a human to achieve world-class expertise in anything. Not just music… writing, bookbinding, printmaking, carpenting, plumbing…

10,000 hours = 20 hours per week for 10 years, Grasshopper.