Shoes and Buses

This morning the girl showed me a badge she had found (somewhere in the house) and wanted to wear to pre-school. It was a pretty pink badge with a fairy on it. Nice, just the thing a cute little girl could wear on her jacket. Except this badge, apart from being very cute, also happened to say "click your heels together three times and go fuck yourself". So I considered her request: the fact that she can't read, none of the other kids at pre-school can read – actually the majority of them can't even speak English – was working in her favour, but in the end I decided it probably wasn't a good idea for her to wear it. I tried to explain that it had a bad word on it and wasn't appropriate for pre-school and eventually she relented.
After I dropped her at pre-school I headed out to Belconnen to go to a shoe shop, the Foot Locker to be precise. I have been doing quite a bit of exercise recently, going to the gym and stuff, and since I spend so much time in exercise gear I decided to upgrade to something half decent. At the Foot Locker store at Woden I found some gym shoes that were black (oh my god!) and had a very subtle gold design in the stripes and were actually quite attractive. Of course they didn't have my size. So I rang the Belconnen store and asked about them, unfortunately I didn't know the brand or the model number but I figured since they were the only black gym shoes (probably in the southern hemisphere) it shouldn't be a problem. Blandberra has a strange staffing thing going on where it seems to be illegal to employ anyone over the age of 15. This is across all areas of retail and hospitality – wherever you go, whatever shop or café you venture into you can be 99% guaranteed to be served by a small child who can barely see over the counter. So speaking to the sales person wasn't so much as akin to speaking to a surly teenager – I actually was speaking to a surly teenager who informed me that his shop stocked several different black women's gym shoes and he couldn't possibly help me with so little information. I said to the husband "I bet they don't have ANY black women's gym shoes" and decided to go and look for myself. I was wrong, they had one pair of cross-trainers that were black, had fringing on them and were hideous. They didn't have any gym shoes at all.
I wandered about the shopping mall, a Westfield (aren't they all?) and marveled at how they can perfectly reproduce shopping malls, much like McDonalds stores, no matter where you go they are all the same. I guess this is supposed to be comforting, the safety of familiarity and all that, I find it unsettling, disturbing and quite sad. One thing Blandberra does not seem to have in any form is strip shopping (stripPER shopping – yes), every shop is contained within a shopping centre. Boring.
Driving back home to collect the girl from pre-school I was following a bus that had a poem in the back window, promoting national poetry week. The lettering of the poem was large enough so that I could read the first bit of it while we were stopped at an intersection, but then had to chase the bus down the freeway and tailgate until I could read the rest of it. It was a nice poem, the first line was something like "he knocked on the hard wood of the casket", so you can understand why I had to read the rest. Needless to say that I was concentrating so hard on tailgating the bus and reading the poem that I missed the turnoff I needed and had to take the very scenic route home. It was worth it though, a nice poem does wonders for the soul, and indeed lack of sole.
Tomorrow at pre-school is a birthday party, the girl needs to wear party clothes and take a present and party food. She will no-doubt go dressed as Snow White or a fairy, I bought some fruit sticks (domestic goddesses have days off too) and the present is a big red spider that has one of those little traction wheelie things in it so it will scoot along the floor. Like the badge says… Read more!

The King

When I was a child I lived with my mother and my younger sister in a flat in Ballarat. My mother was attending teacher's college and she spent long hours at school and longer hours at home studying. I was often left to care for my sister and I soon discovered that if we wanted dinner before 9pm and something of edible quality I had to make it myself. I moved a stool up to the stove and did so. I was 9 years old.
The weekends that weren't spent driving 3 hours to my mother's parent's farm to stock up on food were spent in our little flat watching television. Back in thoose days Elvis films were routinely shown on Sunday afternoons and my mother and I would watch them. Usually she would be in the background doing something else, but we watched together in some capacity. It was just about the only "quality" time I spent with my mother. This began my love affair with Elvis. After less than a year of this lifestyle Elvis died. I remember listening to the news reader announcing the details, I was sitting on the floor in front of the telly and I stretched out my hand to the image of Elvis that was on the screen and felt utter grief. I felt that the loss had diminished the world somehow. My mother was totally nonchalant and insisted she was unmoved by the death. Years later she would claim no memory of having ever watched Elvis films with me at all. I didn't really care if she remembered or not, it didn't change what was. I have maintained my love of Elvis films, my adoration of the sound of his voice, his looks, his eccentric life and eventually the whole Elvis phenomenon. In fact, my first husband (may he die slowly and painfully) bore a very slight resemblance to Elvis and could almost sing like him. I have wondered if this tenuous link to a comfort zone in my childhood was what attracted me to him (fuck knows nothing else makes sense).
So I love Elvis. Elvis's voice has a quality that is soothing and sexy, his face was very sexy but in a non-conventional way that I find very appealing. I have never really gone for the Hollywood poster boy types, I like men that have character: striking and unique faces. Something interesting about them. Elvis was certainly that. As tragic and ultimately as sad as he was, his life was incredible. As a child I cried when I watched his last concert in Las Vegas, when he was fat and unhealthy and forgot the words to Unchained Melody. In hindsight, it would have been better for him to die before he got to that – like Marilyn or James. It is sad that he is remembered as a fat drugged out weirdo who died on the toilet. I prefer to remember him in that sexy leather gear he wore for his comeback special when he was young and gorgeous. Before all the drugs and deep fried peanut butter sandwiches and before the karate instructor started shagging his wife. When life was all about being glamorous and randomly philanthropic.
I used to work near the Carlton cemetery and I jogged through it on my lunch breaks. There is an Elvis memorial grave there that I would stop at, give my regards to, and then shuffle on my calorie burning way. One thing I adored about that fake grave – there were always fresh flowers on it, with cards (yes I read them) that said "I love you always". No other dead husbands or fathers inspired that sort of devotion.
Elvis was special, unique and more than a man of flesh and bones could ever be. He will never really die. I love him always.

Read more!

A Hill

I've struggled with making friends since moving here, mostly from lack of opportunity – as I'm not working the only people I meet are other parents at the pre-school or women at the gym. But also because I am not naturally sociable, I am the world's biggest snob and have a tendency towards arrogance. I do, however, do my best to internalize these negative traits and am generally friendly (I think?). But there have been weeks when the only adult I have spoken to is the husband and as much as I adore him I need other people as well. I have one friend here, who has kept me sane and I am enjoying getting to know her (Hi Jaibee!!) but it would still be nice to have a social life of some sort. Poor me, boo hoo.

Anyway, some of the women from the pump class I go to meet for coffee after the gym so I invited myself along and they seemed fine with that. Then they invited me to come swimming with them on Wednesday morning (today). I was chuffed and was looking forward to it. Anyway, I got up this morning and thought "I don't have anything in common with those women, I don't really like swimming and chlorinated water makes me itchy". So I decided to go for a walk up Red Hill instead.
I studied the map, put my ipod, phone and water bottle in my bag, dropped the kid at pre-school and set off. I had been told there was a café at the top of the hill so my reward for slogging up the incline would be a fabulous view and a nice hot coffee to recharge me for the walk home. It was all good.
I got about ¾ of the way up when the path split in two different directions. Either way led to a summit, I didn't know which way to go but I saw other walkers going to the right so I went that way. After an arduous trudge up a very steep hill I got to the top and all that was there was a bored looking kangaroo - and it wasn't selling coffee. So now I was faced with a dilemma: go back the way I came, take the other track and try to find the café or just keep going. I have something of a mental block about going backwards so I continued on. I got to a part on the track which was seemingly in the middle of no-where when I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was, which direction to go, that the battery in my ipod was about to go flat, I needed a wee and it was starting to rain. I got really cranky. If I had a friend to go walking with I wouldn't need to guess which way to go and I wouldn't get lost. So I stood on the hill, tried to figure out where I was from the buildings I could see in the distance and took a path that seemed to go around the bottom of the hill. Fortunately it took me back to the golf course near home so I knew where I was. The husband rang to ask if I was lost and stranded on top of the hill. Smug bastard. I continued trudging along the edge of the golf course, wondering when a stray golf ball was going to hit me in the head and kill me, when I realized that when I was packing my bag I had neglected to pack my keys. The coffee, hot shower and lunch I had been looking forward to evaporated. So to top off an all round disappointing morning when I finally got home (exhausted) I had to scale a fence, convince the staffy I wasn't a burglar, then climb in through a window. Hideous.


The girl is currently planning her birthday party (for December) and is heart broken because she only likes one of the girls from pre-school and she can't invite her friends from Melbourne. She said to me in a small, sad and lonely voice "we only need to make one invitation". I hope that's not true. I'm sure we will both make some more friends eventually, we have only been here a few months and these things take time. When the girl goes to school next year she will meet heaps of kids and I will start getting out more, doing more things that involve other people, maybe even go swimming. Read more!