The feeling itself is worth something

“The feeling itself is worth something” The sentence came to me fully formed. It articulated something much bigger, more profound than I can properly articulate, I’m guessing. Partly from a yoga class that tested my expectations, unexpectedly [funny how those two words go together]. Partly that my orthotic inserts have finally started to work so my feet hurt less.

At the crack of midnight (or so it felt) I got up to go to yoga. It was a struggle, and I watched myself struggling, wondering what the problem was yet unable to untangle it.  All I knew was that I had to go and I wanted to go, but my legs were made of lead. The part of me that can’t help trying to work things out came up with two possibilities. (1)  I haven’t kept up with my practice as I feel like I should have. ‘Should have’ - says who?  After all, the reason that re-starting yoga after a 15 year break felt so good had nothing (NOTHING) to do with what I should do.  So I’m working on dismissing that one. (2) I haven’t been going to bed early enough.  Only one way to fix that one - get some balance back!

But I got to the tram stop and the tram came on time and I got to yoga. The teacher didn’t, however. Poor petal slept in!  But another teacher was in the class - and he teaches differently to the regular teacher. So we got a class that I hadn’t been expecting and I didn’t enjoy it (to be frank) but I think that doing yoga puts me in a frame of mind where I will actively examine my responses to something. I can’t let it rest at ‘I didn’t like the class’. I had my buttons pressed and my legs, formerly like lead, were forced to do things that the other teacher had never made them do. They became great aching torches at the centre of every thought and non-thought. Oh, the struggle not to be my legs.

But leaving the class, in a frame of mind that is only possible after yoga, breathing consciously, feeling all my body open, stretched, warm, flexible and alive. Feeling cells and fibres, or so it seems. And at the bottom of the stairs, a person. A stranger. A human being. Alive, I smiled. He smiled back. A smile that lit up my world. Just that, and a feeling of connectedness and rightness. We passed, and the smile lingered, with residual feeling of yoga- and smile-induced peace and happiness. Yes, the feeling itself is worth something.

Lifestyle life???

Signage travesty at Victoria Gardens

I keep thinking that rampant corporate spin-speak is a thing of the past, relegated to the realm of inside jokes among those of us who have been in the corporate world long enough to know the true meaning of bullshit bingo. Oh how wrong we can be about things sometimes.

Shopping today at Victoria Gardens for a new rubbish bin I spotted this sign. Somebody without the appropriate training or the ability to think (either one of these attributes would have prevented the travesty of signage I saw today) created this sign. Somebody who didn’t care enough approved it. Somebody with an attitude of [shrugs] ‘not my problem’ laid it out. Somebody else screwed it to the wall. And yours truly took a photograph…

I really don’t want to turn into a grumpy old cow. But how difficult that path is to resist, when one is faced with temptations such as this. I am learning to cultivate a quiet, knowing smile. Uggh.

And also, a young checkout operator yesterday asked me how to spell saucer so he could find it on the database ’cause the barcode had fallen off. Double uggh.

Why you should stay listed in the white pages…

I was working at home this week, pretending to do my tax (between skyping, playing with the cat, putting story ideas on index cards, pruning the lavender, perfecting my chai-making methods, sweeping the path, fiddling with the journal layout…) and the phone rang. I looked at the handset suspiciously, as one does look at a handset that generally has a telemarketer at the end of it, but extempore’s grapic designer was possibly going to call, or it could be my aunty… so I picked it up.

Turns out, the lady on the other end of the line was someone who had visited my family at our little property in East Gippsland in the late seventies, when Mum and Dad opted out and decided to try a self-determined lifestyle away from the imperatives of urban life. She’d remembered me (apparently I was nice back then, though all I remember is angst) and nearly a year after seeing my pic in the Good Weekend, had decided to call and say hello.

I guess that sort of stuff could be expected to happen from time to time to someone who grew up in a rather unusual way (for a 1970s middle-class Australian family), but that’s not what made this unsual.

I’m  a big fan of the co-incidence. (sometimes I spell it with a hyphen and sometimes not; looks like today is a hyphen day) and only the day before, dear reader, I had been thinking how much of an influence the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was on my early writing self and how I wanted to revisit his book The Slave, which had appeared in my life sometime in my teens, and shifted something internally for me.

Well, guess who gave me the book!?  Yes! This lady at the end of the phone had visited us when I was 14 or 15, with her two daughters and given me a copy of  The Slave. I looked up the Wikipedia entry for Singer and found that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 so maybe that’s how she came to do such a thing.

A further searchy-browse on the web took me to my favourite journal The Paris Review. They have published their  interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer (from 1968) on their website!

I’d like to propose a toast: Here’s to co-incidence, the giving of books to teenagers, to following up on fond memories and to being listed in the white pages so people can remind you of things you should never have forgotten! [raises cup of early morning coffee]  Thank you Alex

Words to avoid in the subject line

Just a note to correspondents… I have been updating my spam filters so if you want to be in touch, please avoid using the following words and terms in your email subject line or risk going straight to the rubbish bin: acai, viagra, cialis, rolex, cartier, designer watch, classy watches, jewelry, timepiece, acsub, chase bank, banking alert, college education, banking alert, BankOfAmerica, Bank of America, university diploma, meds, euroclub, Ally bank, penis, pecker, pfizer, casino, vegas, *****SPAM*****  or [----SPAM----]

By including this small list of words in my message filters I have reduced spam into my inbox from approximately 140 items to less than 20 per day.

[short pause for expletive utterance]

humans before doors!

The 109 at St Vincents Plaza, not far from the top end of Collins Street.

Another tram tale (there are millions).

At the top end of Collins Street, there is a tram super stop. It’s so super that it actually has a coin machine so you can change your lobster ($20 note) into coins to be used on the coin-only ticket machine supplied on all trams. Super Dooper!  Another thing that makes this tram stop super is the expediter. I don’t know if that’s what Yarra Trams calls this role, but what he does is hang around the stop during peak hour (and beyond) shepherding people on and off the tram. This tram stop can get messy because it’s not far from Parliament station so lots of people get off the train, walk to this tram stop and then catch a tram to another city destination. And people get off here too, to go to work. From about 8:00 am it can be disorganised, full of pre-coffee commuters completely fixated on their own destination and too deafened and dulled by the sounds emanating from their ear-buds to remember that there are other people trying to get on and off and (more to the point) other trams coming… any minute now…

So, Mr Expediter shouts at people to move away from the doors. He tells them to get on and off quickly. He exhorts them to think of others. I used to think that he was a good guy. He seems to care, and spouts aphorisms like ‘be good to each other’. He has a piercing voice and a slight accent. He wears a greatcoat, and on sunny days he also wears sunglasses. I think he loses the greatcoat in summer.

My view of him has changed.

Last week, I was on the tram at an unusual time of day (around 2:00 pm) I guess Mr Expediter’s shift had finished, because at the top end of Collins Street he got on the tram. What he didn’t notice as he got on, was the drama unfolding at the back of the tram, where an unfortunate woman had stepped off the little plinth that her seat was on, had somehow misjudged the distance (I think she was lost in a book or something). She fell. A young bloke went to help her and she said she wanted to get out of the tram so he held the door. Well if you know the C Class tram at all (almost exclusively used on route 109) you also know that the doors are just a teensy bit temperamental. It seems like sometimes if you hold your mouth wrong, the doors play up. The young man who had rushed to the rescue of the fallen woman held the doors open for her. How gallant!

Mr Expediter, standing near the door and blocking the fallen woman’s exit when she did manage to finally stand up and get herself going could only say. “Don’t hold the doors open. Big trouble.” The young man tried to explain but the man used to pushing anonymous commuters onto and away from trams every day simply spoke over him. “Don’t hold the doors open.” Meanwhile, fallen woman, helped by other passengers, had verified she was not hurt and was making her way shakily to the door. Out she popped, and was standing by the rail, trembling as she dialled her mobile phone.

Next thing, the driver’s door opens at the front of the tram and the driver strides angrily down to the door that had been held open “Who held the door open?!” he yelled, clearly quite cross. Mr Expediter (who it turns out is not only a bully but also a dobber) points straight at Sir Galahad and says, “It was him. I told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen. Nothing else I could do.” Not only a bully and a dobber but a stereotypical example of the institutionalised public servant-esque defensive aggresiveness that makes all our hearts glad…

So a few of us other commuters stood up for the knight in shining armour, who by this time had sat back down, next to a little old lady who smiled at him and patted his arm, no doubt thrilled to bits to find that there are still young men who will help a fallen woman. It could happen to anyone. “Hey,” we said. “A woman had fallen over and the guy was holding the door open for her. Look, she’s there” [we pointed] “She’s still shaking.”

Mr Expediter spoke up too, just so we could all be sure about what part he played in all of this. “I told him not to hold the door, but if he doesn’t listen, what am I supposed to do?”

At this point I found my fist in the air and I was saying “Humans are more important than doors! He did the right thing! Let it go!” I was on my way to a job interview and this was just what I needed to be sure I performed my best.

I think the driver sensed that if he shouted any more he’d have an angry mob on his hands. Maybe he also saw Mr Expediter as being a questionable ally… so he turned his little key in the door mechanism (this is how they fix these things) and marched haughtily back to behind his sliding glass door, closing it forcefully and keeping us out. He tested the doors and we were off, headed down Collins Street. The woman remained on the platform of the super stop, resting heavily against the railing and speaking into her mobile phone…

Tags: Trams

when all is quiet, I’m avoiding looking in the mirror

So it’s been just over a month since the last post, and that was smallish. Lots has happened. Left a job. [wrote stuff here and then deleted it because once it's blogged it's out there forever]

And yet have not blogged, during my numerous free moments. Though in non-related news, did put a rib out yesterday. Reaching down, in the shower, heard and felt a sorta popping releasing thing and thought ‘oh, good!  I’ve clicked my back in’ because it’s been bothering me a bit (in the thoracic region for a change) in the last few days. But then breathing became difficult. As did sitting, lying, standing and (strangely) not breathing!

***

Back to the original thread:

I think if there’s a gap between blogs you can pretty well guarantee it’s because I’m wandering through my life asking myself pointless questions like ‘Why do I want to write stuff in public?’  ‘Why not just write in my large red notebook then incorporate into well-crafted real writing at some later date?’ And then when I start blogging again it’s because I’ve figured out that there is no good answer to that.

Eventually I seem to keep coming back to this: it’s just another genre and I like it. I like being able to talk about trams, mobile phones, toilet cubicles and back pain in a forum that someone may trip over one day and enjoy.Without hurting themselves of course!

Me at dinner with funny friends last night: hahaha ouch ouch hahaha ouch ouch. But thankfully the rib is now back in alignment and I can breathe again!  Thanks Mr Chiropractor of the early mornings!

Tags: back pain, chiropractor, ribs, why blog?

Taking back Saturday

Working 5 days a week brings with it a number of imperatives, not the least of which (now that is a clumsy turn of phrase) is that the 2 days a week we call the weekend become more precious…

My first big mistake, moving from 3 days in the office to 5 days in the office, was to decide that I would get up early on Saturday morning  and work. A sleep in for an hour would have me rising at 7:00am instead of 6:00 am and that would give me a sense of weekend. (I’ll look back on this and laugh, please tell me I will). Then I could go for a quick walk, take a shower, eat my muesli, percolate and sip my coffee and be at my desk by 8:30am, ready for a full day of work. My one concession - a nap in the afternoon.

A wonderful revelation this morning, that giving up brings its own rewards. After another 5 days that ended with me on Friday so exhausted as to be unable to put one foot in front of the other, I decided to go to the gym on Friday night and make no commitments to get out of bed on Saturday morning.

First, I should probably explain the gym thing.

I’m not really sure about the technicalities, but have picked up enough jargon over the past 5 years, since I first attended a gym.  What you might call brain chemistry seems to change when you exercise regularly. I’ve just started a job that’s got lots of stuff going on. Lots o’ stuff. [is there a competition for understatement of the year?] plus dealing with the strange demands of the journal known as extempore; more of that in another post. The whole thing is dragging me down. I don’t get to go out to listen to music half as much as I’d like. I’m always tired. I am losing energy and enthusiasm. The gym helps give some of that energy back. A combination of gym and live improvised music is guaranteed to lift me out of drudgery, but I can’t find the energy to do the latter without spending some time and effort on the former. So it’s gym Friday night and out for some sounds on Saturday…

I got up at 10:00 after reading the arts sections in The Age and The Australian, drinking a cup of coffee in bed and indulging in some bonding time with a certain kitty kat who thinks having the human at home just means an extra dimension of napping pleasure. Stealing body warmth and nesting your kitty kat chin in the crook of the human’s elbow is so much better than curling up on your own on the mohair blanky.

The guilt of not achieving anything has not kicked in because I had not planned to get up at 7:00. When I finally got to my desk, it was after a real sleep-in, a walk to the newsagent and a movie. As I write this, I’ve achieved quite a bit already. There is washing in the machine, a stew on the stove, three emails written, a telephone call made, the page layout for Issue 3  filled in a bit more than it was yesterday… and I’ve also managed somehow to reclaim my Saturday morning. There’s got to be a mantra in that somewhere. Something about letting go?

Either way, 5 days a week is a mug’s game. Seriously. Why do we do it?

Tags: gym, Saturday, Working week

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!

Tags: mobile phone, toilet

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…

pee ess: Joan is Jean D’Arc and George is he of the dragon fame. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.

Tags: SLV, State Library of Victoria, swine flu, technology

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.

Tags: Allan Browne, Eugene Ball, Music, plover, Rimbaud