Saturday with The New Pornographers

I had the most amazing weekend. Saturday night’s gig was truly awesome – one of the best nights I’ve had in a really long time.


It started at my best friend’s place, where, after the obligatory hour or so of changing into different outfits and finally ending up back in the first thing I put on, we headed outside only to find that it was pouring with rain. We sprinted to the street, trying futilely to cover our hair to prevent the sudden and unwelcome sprouting of a moisture-induced afro. My friend (who we’ll call Kate for the purposes of this story) waved her arm into the road like a crazy woman, and although the rain was much too heavy to see anything, somehow, only seconds later we were seated in the warmth of a taxi, wiping frantically at our hair to stop the explosion of frizz.


The taxi ride was short, but as we neared the venue my excitement grew to a point where I was literally bouncing up and down in the seat like a little kid who knows her birthday presents are about to be handed to her. I guess I’m dorky like that.

As the taxi pulled up outside I was ready to bounce right out of the door, and my insane excitement levels had me tipping the driver way more than a 5 minute car ride deserves – although to be fair it was partially so that I wouldn’t have to carry a bunch of stupid coins around in my jeans pocket.


We headed for the door, but found two burly bouncers blocking the way.

‘Can we see some ID please girls?’ The one that looked a little like Tony Danza on steroids asked.

Slow smiles crept across both our faces. This was a very pleasant start to the night. I can’t even remember the last time someone checked my ID! It was probably about 9 years ago.

‘Thanks’ said buff Tony Danza as he handed me back my license. He gave me what I can only assume he thought was a winning smile.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘Thank you!’


We wandered downstairs, grabbed a couple of beers at the bar and headed towards the stage. Two steps led down into a lowered section right in front of the stage, which was about 5 ½ feet above the floor level. We took up our place on the very top step so that Kate would be able to see over everyone. She’s pretty short and usually finds herself spending an entire gig staring at the back of someone’s head – or in this case it would have been the wall in front of the stage.

It was a fantastic spot, only about 6 metres or so from the stage with a completely unobstructed view. I would have like to be a bit closer, but I can’t complain since Kate agreed to come along not knowing any of the band’s songs.


It was about 9pm, and we had arrived just in time to see the support band, Little Scout. They played for about 45 mins, but although they were really good and the lead singer was adorable, I was eager for them to finish so that The New Pornographers would come on. After Little Scout finished we had to wait an excruciating 30 minutes before they took the stage.

As they all wandered on you could feel the excitement levels of the crowd rising. Everyone pushed forward and I found myself looking down into the massive, crazy hair of what I thought was a guy – until the man next to him grabbed him on the bum and I realised that the he was actually a very strange looking she.

Neko Case took her place on stage looking like she had just gotten out of bed; hair tousled and fluffy, wearing jeans and a hoodie. It made me love her just a little bit. She’s so normal, and her wild hair made me feel a lot better about my own crazy rain-ruined locks. Aussies generally make fun of rangas, but Neko would be the exception to that rule.

And Carl Newman was a lot bigger than I thought he would be. I don’t mean that he was fat; far from it. He was just taller and less weedy than I had imagined him.


They jumped straight into it, and the next 2 hours were filled with the most amazing live music I think I’ve ever heard. Maybe it was just that I like their stuff so much, or maybe it was all the wine and beer I had drunk, but it was just phenomenal. They mostly played their newer songs, but included the more well known tracks off their older albums too. There wasn’t a single song that didn’t have my foot tapping or my body moving.


Part way through the show, an audience member yelled out for them to play ‘Myriad Harbour’. They said they couldn’t, because they didn’t have Dan Bejar there to sing it. Later, when they came out for their first encore, they offered to play it if someone from the crowd would get up on stage and sing it with them. After a couple of moments of waiting, and it looking like no one would do it, a voice yelled out from somewhere behind me

‘Ah fuck it, I’ll do it!’

A cheer went up in the vicinity of the anonymous voice and spread slowly around the room. A guy pushed through the crowd, too short to be seen until he jumped up on stage. After a quick request that someone film it, he sang the entire song with the band – and pretty well, too. The crowd went wild, and cheered so loud and so long that the band came back out and played a second encore.

After the gig, we went to a bar where Kate’s roommate works and had a couple of drinks. Some random Canadian guy bought me a drink because I managed to guess where he was from and because I’d just come from seeing a Canadian band. A drunken Mexican hugged me repeatedly, and a guy who has been trying to hook up with Kate tried continually (and very obviously) to make a good impression on me. Which was wise, after all - because if the best friend likes you, it goes a very, very long way. Especially when it comes to Kate.


At about 2am the bar closed, and I was absolutely exhausted (you know, like I’ve said before - because I’m old and boring). Kate, on the other hand, pretty much never sleeps (because it gets in the way of all the drinking), so she stayed out while I staggered off home, to fall asleep and relive my awesome night over again in my head.

Being Anti-Stalked

I like Facebook. It keeps me amused when work is slow. It feeds my scrabble addiction. It lets my best friend show me what her new boyfriend is like before I meet him.

What I don’t like about it is the school yard politics of it all. The controversy of deleting or rejecting a ‘friend’. The things that people post that they seem to think the rest of the world can’t see. The light-weight stalking that can go on.


I think I am being anti Facebook stalked. There is a girl who is a Facebook ‘friend’ who has added every single one of my friends that she has met for more than 15 seconds to her friends list. Now she is sending them all public wall posts, trying to make plans to go out with them. Without me. On Facebook. Where I can see.

It’s like the opposite of Facebook stalking. Instead of stalking me, she’s stalking all my friends and making it very clear that she is specifically not stalking me. Which in a lot of ways is more irritating than actual stalking. Because it’s hurtful rather than obsessive.


To be honest, I think she’s gone slightly crazy. She dated a friend of mine, and because of that, she thought we were best mates. She would ring me all the time and make plans to catch up without her boyfriend - which seemed slightly odd at the time, but I put it down to her just wanting to get along with his friends.

Then for a little while, she suddenly stopped calling or texting me. I didn’t think much of it, until I found out later that she was angry at me because I didn’t invite her to be a bridesmaid in my wedding. Because apparently you’re supposed to invite people you hardly know to be a part of stuff like that.


Then she and my friend broke up. That’s when the weirdness started. She rang my phone at 2am one morning and with barely a hello, demanded to speak to KJ. She demanded that he go and get all of her stuff from our friend’s place, and harass him for some money. When KJ said he couldn’t, she demanded to know why, as though he owed her an explanation for not jumping when she asked him to do something.
The next day she called me again, and when I told her that I didn’t think the phone call was appropriate, I got accused of being a bad friend. She said a lot of really mean things, and then she told me that I should be on her side. As if I want to take sides in someone’s relationship breakup!


And now the Facebook weirdness is starting. I’d like to just de-friend her, but I’ve said it before - I’m no good with confrontation. I would feel guilty about it for months.


I can’t understand people who cling to petty arguments or hold grudges for juvenile reasons. I’ve come across a few people like that in the past couple of years and I just can’t deal with them. They’re high on drama all the time. I don’t like drama ever really. I might be a little tightly wound at times, but never dramatic. And I don’t have time for people who want to turn everything into a big production.
But I always come back to this problem where once they’re in my life I can’t just cut them out, because the guilt slowly eats away at me until I feel sick from it.
I’d like to just go on with life only knowing people who are so laid back they’re almost horizontal. Instead I keep coming across these people who make everything into what feels like the script of a bad sitcom.

I think my best bet is to employ a front man - like the corporate face of Torrygirl. Someone to have all the awkward and angry confrontations for me, so that I’m just kept in the dark. That way, I can be crazy person and guilt free.

Happy, Sad, Hungover & Healthy

This past weekend was both immensely fun and incredibly sad.

On Saturday night I had dinner with Liam (the fun part), because on Sunday he left the country to head to England for at least the next three years (the sad part).


We met for drinks first and I had a couple of beers – the kind which some crazy foreigner told me cut it as a longneck in other parts of the world. To me a longneck is a 750ml bottle that nowadays is mostly reserved for getting drunk as quickly as possible at weddings, not a 375ml bottle. But I’m getting off track.

As it usually goes with Liam, dinner involved a couple of bottles of wine, although I managed to stay coherent enough to remember the next day that we went to a Dumpling bar – where I ate some very odd things, like soup dumplings and chicken ribs.

Given the size of a chicken I wouldn’t have thought that a chicken rib would be much more than a tiny little bone with nothing on it, so I felt that it was important to order them to see what they were like. Oddly enough, the dish ended up being a plate of very small fried chicken pieces amidst 7 or 8 cupfuls of dried chillies. Very weird and random.

The soup dumplings (Shao-Long Bao) were one of the strangest things I’ve ever had. They were like regular dumplings, but instead of just the regular meat filling, they had soup in them too. I’m not sure how they got it to stay in there, but it was an incredibly strange yet awesome thing to eat – you pretty much had to eat them whole, and then they sort of exploded in this mass of intense flavours in your mouth. Bizarre but soooo good.


Dinners with Liam are always memorable ones, so the copious amounts of alcohol never seem to do any real harm to my memory of the nights events. The problem with this particular dinner was that KJ and I had committed ourselves to finally getting off our fat lazy butts and attempting some exercise on Sunday, and unfortunately a night out with Liam does not lend itself well to things like Sunday exercise.

Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately), the day turned out to be one of the nicest we’ve had in months. The sun was shining, but not too hot and the air was cool. I wore shorts for the first time in what feels like an eternity. I wore a t-shirt without having to put on a jumper! How could I turn down the chance to get out an about in a day that was so damn annoyingly gorgeous?! I’ve been pining for weather like this since May.


We had a couple of bikes for the weekend, so we thought we’d give them a bit of a go and see how they went. I didn’t realise it had been quite so long since I’d last been on a bike. I’m sure they say that riding a bike is something you never forget, but with my last bike ride about 10 year behind me and a killer hangover telling me to get off the bike and drag myself back to bed, it seemed possible that I may not remember how it all worked.

Luckily, after a slightly shaky start, and a scary moment in which I found myself going the fastest I’ve travelled in years without two tonnes of metal and several airbags to protect me, I managed to get going and all the enjoyment that I used to get out of riding came back to me. Within about 5 minutes I had lost sight of KJ, but that didn’t seems to matter because it was a nice day and it felt good to be outside.

We only rode about 3km, but considering how I feel about exercise, that wasn’t too bad. And I was wary of doing myself some kind of injury by pushing myself too far to start with.

I was pleased to find that while I could feel the burn from the work my muscles were doing, they were still up to the task. Sadly, I couldn’t quite say the same for my lungs, which have endured several years of smoking, quite a few more of passive smoking and a lot of lack of exercise since my last bike ride.


I think I’d pretty happily go riding again, although I’m not sure how I feel about riding with someone. I kind of like the solitude of it, and it feels different having someone else there. I’m not sure if it’s different good or different bad. At this stage it’s just different.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. It could end up like a lot of other things we do – something we keep meaning to get back to, but never quite manage to make the time for.

Retail Therapy

I have been known to eschew a lot of stereotypical 'girly' things, but one thing I will never doubt is the therapeutic benefit of retail therapy.
After what would have to be one of the worst working weeks I have ever had, I spent Saturday and Sunday emptying the contents of my bank account on a myriad of new clothes and shoes.

Minutes after getting home, I felt completely relaxed and at ease. It's something I don't think men will ever understand. You only need to look at all the boyfriends and husbands who have been dragged along to the shops by their partners to realise that the benefit of retail therapy is something that will always elude men. Moments after enter the shopping centre, they're already bored and desperate to leave. They just don't get the same kind of thrill from the shopping experience as women do.


Women, on the other hand, understand the true value of shopping. Its not just about spending money - although something about that does provide a kind of release. It's about feeling good about yourself. It's about walking in to a store and putting something pretty on, or trying on a pair of jeans and having a sales assistant, some random person you've never met before, telling you that you look hot. And it doesn't matter one bit that they're paid to say those kinds of things even if you look like a sausage that has been stuffed in to a skin two sizes too small, because it feels so damn good either way.


It's been so long since I went shopping for clothes, that once I started, it was hard to stop. Saturday I went alone and it was like a warm up for Sunday, when I caught up with a friend and did the most damage to my bank balance.

The benefit of retail therapy with someone else there is that they suggest that you try on things you otherwise wouldn't. In this case, it happened that I wanted a new pair of jeans for when I go out - something a bit dressy but still casual. My friend suggested that I try on a pair of black skinny leg jeans - something that I've avoided up until now.

I was sceptical, but I tried them on anyway - because that's what retail therapy is all about. Good move. They looked awesome in every way. They made me look thin and tall, they made my butt appear perfectly shaped. When I tried on a pair of heels with them, I felt like I could have stepped right out of a catalogue. Well, my legs did, anyway.

The overly effeminate salesman gushed about how wonderful they looked, and so did my friend. For five minutes I felt really damn good about myself. And that's what it's all about I guess. Taking a week worth of crappiness and putting it behind you in five minutes of retail therapy.

Super Friday

Tonight I’m going to see Powderfinger play at Rod laver Arena. Yep, I’m all about the concerts lately. No dodgy arm stamps at this one though.

The best thing about this concert is that a friend got us tickets for a Superbox – so instead of being shoulder to shoulder with lots of loud, drunken fans; waiting in queues 100 people long to get a drink or use the toilet; I’ll be sitting up high in my soft, comfy chair having drinks brought to me with a wave of my hand. Or something like that.

Mmmm, corporate goodness

I’m not actually a massive Powderfinger fan as such, although I don’t mind them; but what I am excited about is that the support band is JET! At first I just agreed to go to the concert because KJ really likes Powderfinger, but now I’m actually pretty excited because JET are playing for about an hour as well.


I’m not really sure how the Superbox thing will affect the atmosphere of the concert – it’s about as far removed from the reasonably intimate Whitlams show I went to as you can get. Rod Laver Arena seats about 15,000 people, so it’s a hell of a lot different to a room with a couple of hundred people in it. And I’m not sure if sitting up high in a corporate box will mean that some of the atmosphere of the show is lost on us. There’s something about being in a throng of people all swaying to the same music that makes a show special. Having said that, it’s Friday and I’m incredibly tired because I’m old and boring, so the idea of standing up for 5 hours straight isn’t something I’m all that keen on – atmosphere or no atmosphere. So bring on the comfy chair and drinks service!


My other concern for the night is that we have to leave straight from work to get there, so I need to get ready here before we leave. The problem with that is that there are no mirrors here. Not one single mirror in the entire building. I will have to spend half an hour trying to do my hair and makeup while peering into a tiny little hand mirror. That leaves a lot of room for error. I could find myself with flawlessly straight hair except for one afro section in the back. I could do my makeup perfectly then find that I’ve missed an entire side of my face. Ok, these things are unlikely, but still. It’s pretty damn hard to get ready in a hurry without a mirror.


Because I think it’s nice to share my experiences, here’s a little of what I’m heading to tonight. Close your eyes, stand very close to someone else and sway a little while you play it. See if you can’t fake a bit of the atmosphere that I may miss out on.

Inked Up

On Saturday night a group of us headed out to the Corner Hotel in Richmond to see The Whitlams play. I went and saw them a little while back and they were incredible; such a fantastic band to see live. So when the opportunity arose to see them play one more time before they go on an extended break, I jumped at the chance. It also doesn’t hurt that Tim Freedman is pretty hot.


When we entered the venue, they stamped our wrists with a purple ink stamp of some cute little Snork-like creatures. Nothing unusual about that in itself. What is unusual is that it took me until this morning’s shower to get the damn thing off. I’ve been walking around for 3 days with a smudgy purple Snork couple tattooed across my wrist. I’m not a tattoo kinda girl, but if I was to get one it definitely wouldn’t be a couple of excessively cute cartoon creatures smeared across my wrist. It would probably be something useful, like a couple of lines for a to-do list, or maybe a small map of the city. Possibly some emergency phone numbers, but definitely not a dolphin, rose or random Chinese symbol.

Basically it looked like I’d been to a club and not showered for 3 days.

I’m not entirely sure why my stamp wouldn’t come off, because the two friends who crashed at my place that night woke up next morning with little purple Snorks all over their bodies from where their wrists had touched against them in their sleep. My skin must have some kind of magical ink-retaining properties that other people lack.

Combine this smudgy night-out remnant with the bruises and pin prick marks all over my arms from the hack job of a blood test I had on Saturday morning, and I looked like I spent the weekend at a rave rather than a Whitlams concert. Which is obviously not the case, because I can actually remember my weekend and it was totally drug and techno free - but still lots of fun.

Drinks, Reindeer and Armpits with a Friend

On Saturday night I had dinner with my best friend who has been overseas for the last couple of months. Whenever she's been away, we have a huge catch up session over dinner and drinks, which usually results in us having to go out for another catch up because we can't really remember the first one.

We threw around a few ideas on where we could go for the night, and one suggestion was the local pub. I've lived in my house for over 4 years now, and in all if that time I've never managed to muster up the motivation to walk to my local, which is basically at the end of my street. This is mostly because my street is super steep, so it's an uphill walk and it's a well established fact that I'm too lazy for that sort of thing.

I checked out the distance from my house to the pub on google maps, and I realised that it's actually less than 500m. That means that I live closer to a bar than my best friend, who lives smack bang in the middle of Melbourne city centre. Provided you don't count strip clubs as bars, that is.

Given the proximity, we decided that it was our best option for a big catch up night. I searched deep down inside of me and mustered up some tiny dredges of motivation and we set off. I think knowing that my reward for the walk would be an ice cold beer probably helped.

It turns out that the pub is kind of a cool place. It's an old building built some time in the late 1800's, and the walls are covered in memorabilia and random junk, with things like old gas masks, statues and even an old prosthetic limb suspended from the ceiling. In the bar area, there is a big flat screen TV (showing the footy, of course), and right next to it was a mounted reindeer head which later in the night I became convinced was staring at me. In the bistro area a band was playing old rock songs, and just as I'd hoped the beer really was ice cold. So we found a seat, got settled in and started to catch up on eight weeks worth of gossip.


Several beers into the night, we found ourselves discussing realtionships, and in particular the huge amount of effort that goes into keeping a woman looking attractive.
I pointed out that once a woman is in a relationship, there comes a certain point where the regular routine maintenance starts to slide, and she can find herself letting things like shaving her legs go a lot longer than she would ever have when she was single. This, we decided, was probably at about the same time as you're able to safely change your facebook status to show that you're 'in a relationship' with someone without looking too over eager (or nerdy).

We decided that maybe the 'is in a relationship' status would be more appropriate if they changed it to 'has stopped shaving her armpits.'  We thought this was such a good idea that we declared that we would draft an email to the Facebook site designer first thing Sunday morning and demand that they change it immediately.

Needless to say, that email remains (thankfully) unwritten.

Big Boys Don't Cry....Do They?

I had a little whinge the other day about having to console some friends who have recently broken up (for what seems like the 500th time).

What I didn’t mention is that one of them is a friend as well as a co-worker. He sits at the desk next to me and at the moment, I’m kind of his temporary supervisor. By supervisor, I mean that my job is basically to give him a hard time about doing his work properly. This involves pushing him pretty hard for most of the day and drumming into him how important it is that he does things properly.

This has been made really awkward now, because during work hours I’m supposed to be the serious supervisor, but it’s really hard when at completely random moments, he will begin dabbing at the corners of his eyes with a tissue and getting all emotional.


I’ve never really had any problems separating my work from my personal life. I’ve always been good at it - I have to be, because I work with KJ, so if I couldn’t we would probably be divorced already. It gets a bit hard in this situation though, because you can’t just ignore someone being upset. But it’s difficult to be the concerned and caring friend trying to let him know that you’re there for him, then in the next breath demand to know why he forgot to do some critical part of his job. I might be great at separating work from personal stuff, but I'm hopeless when it comes to combining the two in any way.


Also, for some reason I just find it so much more gut-wrenching when it’s a guy doing the crying. It’s stupid to pretend like guys never cry, but I guess that as a female I’m aware how often women cry, but have no idea when it comes to men. After speaking to his ex last night, I was completely unsurprised that she cried for our entire half hour phone call - in fact I expected her to. And yet a few tears from him has me at a loss for what to say or do.


So, awkward times at the moment.

Weekend

I’ll warn you now that this is an insanely dull post, but I needed to vent, because I have had the most emotionally draining weekend ever.


On Friday my Nanna had her post surgery appointment with her surgeon. They told her that she needs to have low dose chemotherapy as a follow up treatment to make sure the cancer doesn’t return.
That was the final straw for her– she just totally lost it. All she heard was ‘chemotherapy’. She blocked out all the ‘low dose’ parts; about how different it is to regular chemotherapy; how you don’t lose your hair and most people don’t even get nauseous. She just kept telling us over and over how she didn’t want to lose her hair, and how she wasn’t going to have the treatment; that she was 81 and she wasn’t going to live forever anyway.

I spent all of Saturday with her trying to cheer her up and trying to stop her from talking herself out of having the treatment. By the end of the day she was a lot better, but it was exhausting – she’s very pessimistic at the best of times, so you can imagine that something like this had her at her peak.

I’m worried for her. Not because she needs the chemotherapy – honestly, if you met her you wouldn’t worry either. She’s one of the toughest 81 year olds you’ll ever come across. And she’s bounced back from her surgery quicker than a lot of people half her age do. I worry because she’s confused about the facts of her illness, and she might just end up getting very sick from the cancer because of something as stupid as thinking she might lose her hair because she won’t listen to the people telling her otherwise.



After a stressful Saturday, Sunday saw a couple of very close friends of mine who have been together for five years breaking up (again). They’ve split up about 5 or 6 times during the course of their relationship because they’ve known from the start it wouldn’t work out long-term. She wants to get married and have kids; he is vehemently opposed to both – to the point where he tried to get a vasectomy at age 23. They told him of course that they wouldn’t do it until he was older because a lot of people change their minds about these things. She found out about him trying and was furious – yet somehow that wasn’t enough of a warning for her that it was time to end things.

They moved in together about a year ago and that was the beginning of the end. You can’t live with someone and continue to ignore the fact that you want very different things. So Sunday was spent consoling one of them. It seems harsh, but I’m a little out of patience with their break ups. Every time they split up, I spend days comforting one or the other, only for them to get back together almost immediately.
Now when it happens, I feel as though I have nothing left to say to them. I feel as though I just want to yell at them to just get on with their lives and that they’re both better off apart.

At least this time it will probably stick, because they will be putting physical distance between themselves when she moves out.


So that was my weekend – cancer and break-ups. Not the relaxing weekend I had been hoping for.

Bad Day, Good Weekend

You know what? I’m having kind of a bad day today. Not a good sign given it’s only 11am.

Sometimes it would be nice if you could just switch your brain off for a little while. Unfortunately, my brain is switched into overdrive at the moment. And thanks to one of the multitudes of medications I’m taking at the moment, I’m having especially vivid dreams every night as well. I have what feel like indecently vivid dreams most of the time anyway (not to be confused with vivid indecent dreams which are often more fun), but at the moment they’re the kind of dreams that are cutting through all of the random subconscious crap and really getting to the point of how I’m actually really feeling.

I think I prefer the whole skirting around my actual feelings way of dreaming – they hit you less hard and you don’t wake up feeling restless and slightly upset and/or angry.

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Ok, enough complaining now. I wanted to write about my weekend, because it’s been a month since I’ve been free to write about regular everyday occurrences and it’s been driving me crazy.

Remember Liam from Q is for Queer? I caught up with him on Saturday night for dinner and drinks. He’s just gotten back from the UK where he’s been studying, so I haven’t seen him since we saw Liza Minelli together back in October of last year. This meant that we had a lot of catching up to do – so we caught up over tapas and a number of bottles of wine.

Little plates of food and big bottles of wine are a fun Saturday night combination. This is the first weekend since I got sick in early May that I’ve gone out and really drunk a lot, and honestly it was GOOD. You take a bit of a break from regular life to feel crap for a month or two, and then afterwards everything seems so much more fun. I highly recommend it. Well, not the being ill part, but definitely the taking a break to better appreciate the good things.

It was completely worth the hangover the next day, although to be honest, the hangover wasn’t as bad as it would have been if we were drinking cheap wine. I can definitely testify to the fact that we weren’t drinking cheap wine, because as a drunk I love everyone, which instils in me an overwhelming desire to pay for everything without regard for what it costs. Hence I woke up the next day with an enormous headache and an even more enormous credit card charge.

It was a lot of fun though. We even discussed Tom a little, and how he has plunged himself (metaphorically) into being the stereotypical gay, while Liam has remained the same core person that he always was.

We’ve made plans to catch up again soon, when Liam’s partner is back from the UK for a few months before they move there to live for a few years. I’m looking forward to it, and looking forward to getting back into the swing of regular weekend life as well.

Some things take practise

I have a pretty big headache today. I think I need more sleep. Actually, to be honest I think my headache is more related to the fact that I now have a pitifully low tolerance for alcohol than anything to do with the amount of sleep I got. It turns out that drinking takes practise.

It used to be that I could catch up with my best friend (let’s call her Katy, because that’s what the random name generator said I should call her) and we could match each other drink for drink. That was a long time ago though. Over the years, she’s kept well practised at drinking while I have lost all of my drinking skill.
We used to go out and I would drink a half bottle of Jim beam (straight, of course, because mixers are for wimps) and she would drink half a bottle of Vodka. If I drank half a bottle of JB now, you wouldn’t find me asleep on my front door step because I couldn’t work out how to get my key in the lock like you used to – you’d probably find me in hospital having my stomach pumped. Nowadays I’m pretty sure that even after just a few drinks I would just skip the whole lack of co-ordination thing and go straight from silly to comatose, with none of the fun bits in between.

Katy, on the other hand, could now drink an entire bottle of vodka without too much trouble. It all comes down to practise, and I am well out of it.


It makes for a cheap night out usually, and I’m pretty good at knowing my limits, but when Katy is around my self-imposed limits tend to have a way of slipping my mind until we’re half a dozen cocktails and a bottle of wine into the night. After that I can’t even remember what a limit is.

So Saturday night passed in what I seem to remember is quite a fun blur of drinking, gossiping and eating. I woke up at midday on Sunday, and the process started all over again, with my sister in law showing up a few hours in with a couple more bottles of wine and some trashy dvds.

It was a great girls weekend, but it definitely reminds me that drinking needs practise, and trying to ignore your lack of practise is a little like trying to ease back into jogging by running a marathon.

The Height of Romance

I caught up with some old friends on the weekend – they’re one of the couples that I know who met online. They don’t tell a lot of people how they met, because they’ve been together since before internet dating was the norm, so they still have that residual nerdy embarrassment about meeting on the internet that they find hard to let go of.


The first thing you notice about this couple when you meet them is that he is a hell of a lot taller than she is –about a foot and a half taller. Which is fine, of course – but it got me thinking. There seems to be some sort of unwritten rule that says that the man must be the same height or any amount taller than his wife/partner, and never the other way around. How often do you see a couple where the man is shorter than the woman?

It must be a throwback to all those old-fashioned traditions in which the man is the dominant partner. Maybe it’s because men are supposed to be the hunter-gatherer, and how can you be the provider and protector for the family if the ‘homemaker’ of the couple makes you look like a midget?


The reason I got thinking about this is that this couple didn’t meet through a dating site or anything; they just met randomly on a chat site. So when they first started to get to know each other, they had that magical internet blindness which means that he could just as easily have been a foot and a half shorter than her rather than a foot and a half taller. What then? Does that sort of thing come up in conversation? Or is everyone like me and imagines that everyone they talk to online is the exact same height as them and has an Australian accent? (I also imagine everyone as a brunette, but I’m not sure that that’s entirely relevant here. Or normal.)

Could you get all the way to the point of falling in love and flying across the country/world to meet up only to find that your future wife is so tall that you have to shield your eyes from sun glare when looking into her eyes? Or is there some deep inborn sixth sense that means that you can never fall in love if you’re taller than the man you’re getting to know?


I’ve actually had a bit of experience with this height issue thing. I once dated a guy who was a hell of a lot shorter than me – probably about an entire foot shorter. He was a pretty muscled up kinda guy who was training to be in the armed forces, so I never felt like I was the huge giant who could overpower him, but it was still kinda weird. And I could never wear heels when we went out, which I hated and which was possibly the downfall of our entire relationship. Wearing heels makes you feel hot and makes you want to dance more. But dancing is kind of weird when the person leading is shorter than you are.

I couldn’t have gone the rest of my life wearing flats everywhere and sitting by watching other people dancing. I mean, there are lots of songs with lyrics like ‘You make me feel like dancing’, but not a whole lot like ‘you make me feel like dancing but I can’t because you also make me self conscious about my height.’ Besides being overly wordy, if that were a song it wouldn’t be a peppy love song, it would be a tragic country song.


This brings up other questions too – like what about gay couples? Is it weird for one of the guys being shorter than his partner? And what about people with dwarfism? Does male versus female height matter when you’re both shorter than most other people already?


Is it really only possible to fall in love with a man that is taller than you are? And could an internet romance be ruined just by finding out that you were taller than he is? I have to wonder if my friends would still be together if the height difference was reversed. I‘d like to think that it wouldn’t matter, but to be honest, I would be miserable if KJ weren’t so much taller than me that I can wear heels and still be the shorter of the two of us.

Conversations with a Vegetarian Friend

Me: So you guys just come round after work at whatever time and we'll chuck some stuff on the bbq.
Vegetarian: Great! Do you want me to bring something?
Me: Sure, why don’t you bring a salad or something?
Vegetarian: Actually salads aren’t really my forte...
Me: ......

---

Me: I made vegetarian lasagne, you should come round for dinner!
Vegetarian: Cool, what stuff is in it?
Me: It has tomatoes and zucchini...
Vegetarian: Oh I don’t really like zucchini.
Me: ...and mushrooms and capsicum and ...
Vegetarian: Oh, mushrooms, yuck.
Me: ...eggplant and silverbeet.
Vegetarian: Yeah I don’t like either of those
Me: Are there any vegetables you do eat?
Vegetarian: I’m not really a big fan of vegetables actually.
Me: .....

Old-School Embarrassment

On Saturday night (my only night out all weekend) I had that embarrassing experience of showing up to what was supposed to be a costume party and finding that what I was wearing was way over the top.

And I was worried that I would be under-dressed for it!

We were supposed to dress up in vintage cocktail attire – specifically 1920’s or 1950’s; so I went all-out 50’s style with the big swing skirt and the curled hair and red lipstick only to find that everyone else showed up in dresses that could only vaguely be attributed to being styled in a rough approximation of a 1950’s-ish look.


This is why costume parties should be banned.


My brother-in- law, on hearing that we were going to a costume party said to me 'I would rather be stabbed than go to a costume party'.
At the time I thought he was being a little extreme. After going to this party, however, I’m inclined to agree with him.

The only saving grace of this particular costume party is that it was thrown by a girl who is an absolute genius at making punch. She has a skill that somehow allows her to make a bowl of punch from 3 bottles of hard liquor and a very small quantity of juice that tastes entirely non-alcoholic. Needless to say, things tend to get messy fast and this is helpful in trying to ignore the fact that you’re dressed like you’re headed to a 1950’s dance hall.

The other very odd thing about this party was that of the 25 people there, only four of them were male. Odd. It was like a girls night out on steroids.


So I’m vowing ‘never again’ to the costume party idea. It’s corny and expensive and you only end up looking like a fool and needing to get really drunk to compensate.

Super Secret Power

You know, I think I might have a secret super-power – The power of being unmemorable. In fact, I might just be the most unmemorable person ever.

On Tuesday evening I went along to a car show sort of thing to take some photos. There are a bunch of photo-taking people that we know, a few of whom I’ve only met once or twice. There is one in particular who I met a couple of months ago – let’s call him Jake.

At that time, we had all met up and had dinner at a Vietnamese place in the city before going out to take photos. The place was small and kind of crowded, so the group was split up all over the restaurant. KJ and I sat at a table of 4 with a guy we know pretty well and Jake, who I was meeting for the first time. We were in the restaurant for about an hour. We chatted the whole time. We laughed a lot. Jake taught me how to eat noodle soup with chopsticks (the source of most of the laughter). We left the restaurant and went to take photos. A good night.

Fast forward to Tuesday night, and a group of us were all standing around having just arrived. Jake wanders over and greets the guys that he knows quite well. One of them is unsure if we’ve met Jake before so introduces me and the girl I was standing next to. “Jake, this is Torrygirl & Lara”
Jake reaches out, shakes my hand and says “Nice to meet you Lara”.
What the...?!

I can only blame my social retardation for this really. I assume that my total lack of small talk ability means that I never really say anything interesting enough to make me memorable. That or I overestimate the average person’s memory. I never forget meeting people like that.


This isn’t just a one-off sort of thing, it happens to me all the time. It’s not good for the old self esteem really. I might have to resort to making up things so that people remember me. Or dye my hair bright pink. You don’t forget something like that. Unless this really is a super power, in which case I probably can’t get around it. I might just have to buy some spandex and a cape and learn to live with it.

Dodgy Dinner

Last night I went to a friend’s place after work, and she made dinner. In the past she has always come to my place because she never had a place of her own, so I’ve always made dinner for her. She’s a vegetarian, and since my vegetarian cooking skills are fairly limited, I usually make risotto. So she decided that since that’s what I usually make for her, she would make it for me this time. I was happy with that – I always figure that as long as I don’t have to make it myself, anything is great. I may have to revise that belief after last night.

I make my risotto from a recipe I found in a Jamie Oliver book – it’s the most awesome, creamy, cheesy risotto I have ever had. I’ve made it so many times that I know the recipe by heart, which means when my friend watches me make it, she sees me throwing things into a pot as though I’m making it up along the way, when really I’m just working to the recipe from memory. I think that this might be to blame for what turned out to be the most shockingly abysmal meal I have ever had.

I can only assume that her risotto last night was made based on the principle of remembering what I’ve done before and trying to copy it. When I showed up, she had just started cooking, and as I watched her prepare the risotto, she got everything so far out of whack that I couldn’t watch any more.

She used a carton of supermarket stock (vile, nasty stuff that always smells like rotten vegetables), and she would pour big glugs of wine in at random intervals throughout. She had the heat up so high that everything she poured in just evaporated on impact. Quite bizarrely, she tested it about 5 minutes into the cooking process, when the rice would have still been hard enough to hurt your teeth and said “yep, nearly done”.
And then, in the last, most important stage, where you add butter and parmesan cheese to make it go all gooey and creamy, she put so much butter in that you could see it running through the incredibly undercooked grains of rice.

She then proceeded to dish up a gigantic bowlful for me, which I had to crunch my way through so as not to seem rude.

I felt bad, thinking that she had tried to make something on my account and failed – but I spoke to her boyfriend today, and he told me that it wasn’t just a case of her trying to make something that she didn’t know how to cook – apparently she’s just not very good at cooking in general. And in fact, she is completely unaware of this fact and thinks that her food is spectacular.

Now I feel sorry for her boyfriend, because I’m happy to pretend to enjoy her cooking every once in a while, but he has to do it every day of his life.

Liza with a Z

Sunday night was the Liza Minnelli concert – you’ll have to forgive me for waiting until today to post about it, because a few post-concert drinks meant that I wasn’t really feeling up to coherent sentences yesterday.

The concert was excellent and horrifying all at once. You could tell that she is (or was) a proper entertainer of 1950’s influence. I guess with Judy Garland as a mother you couldn’t help but be influenced by that era.

The show was excellent because even at 63 years of age, Liza can still perform and can still entertain a crowd. But it was horrifying because at 63 years of age, the inability to show even the faintest wrinkle on your face is just creepy.

In the opening numbers, I was horrified by the skeletor-like grin on her face - a woman shouldn’t be able to smile and show all of her teeth without creating even a few tiny wrinkles. Then after a song or two, Liza seemed incredibly breathless and was panting heavily. I became increasingly paranoid that she was going to keel over on stage. I was convinced that I had come to the show where Liza was going to drop dead on stage, and while that would have been memorable, it’s not something that I wanted to happen.

I guess it was a weird concert for me because her age, illnesses and show biz lifestyle have taken their toll, and I think a lot of what people enjoyed about the show is what they remember of Liza at her peak. For someone who hasn’t followed her career right through, it was more like an echo of something better. A lot of her high notes were lost and her lisp a lot more pronounced than I ever recall it. But she still knows how to keep a crowd entertained, and in amongst it all there were a few fantastic moments – in particular when she sang ‘New York, New York’ to a standing ovation.

It was a chance that I’ll never have again, so I’m glad that I went along. Sometimes it’s nice to go to the sorts of things that you wouldn’t have gone to on your own.


In unrelated news, entries for the Photo5 comp are due by the end of the week, so I might be a little absent this week as I rush around taking last minute shots. I've only finished 2 out of the 5 briefs so far, so I have quite a bit to do still. Wish me luck!

Life is a Cabaret

In a giant cliché, this Sunday I am going with a gay friend to see Liza Minnelli in concert.

This isn’t something I planned to do – Liza Minnelli wasn’t exactly top of my list of entertainers to see in concert - but my friend bought himself a couple of tickets as a birthday present and his partner is currently overseas, so I’m taking his place.

It should be good. I don’t mind music like this. In fact I’ve yet to come across a form of music that I don’t like – with the exception of some grunge music (in particular Nirvana, who I think are the most over rated band in history) and that weird rainforest/pan flute/bird noise sort of music that is supposed to help you sleep but really just induces a subconscious fear of being eaten by large carnivorous birds.

We had to watch Cabaret back when I was at high school and I quite liked the music – it was catchy – it made you want to kick your legs in the air and strut around. That’s pretty typical of show tunes-ey type music I think.

Luckily, I don’t think there will be room at Rod Laver Arena for that sort of thing.

The Soppiness Machine

Super-Facebook-Soppiness makes me want to vomit into my handbag and mail it to the guilty party with a note that says “since we’re sharing...”

How do people not understand that Facebook is a public space, not a private place for them to spew fountains of gushiness at their loved one?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-affection – everyone gets a little gooey like that on occasion (whether they’ll admit it or not). It’s just that I very firmly believe that it’s a private thing between you and the one you love – not you and the 400 people you’ve added as friends because you might have brushed past them in the hallway of a random building somewhere once back in 1972.

I have one particular friend whose girlfriend churns this stuff out as if she were a purpose built sop-machine. No matter how obscure and unrelated to her my friends status updates may be, she invariably comments in some way about how much she loves him and misses him and wants to kiss him.
If he comments on the football, she tells him she loves football as much as she loves him. If he comments about being tired, she gives a long winded speech about how she hates it when he leaves her in bed and that she’s cold and lonely and wants him to come back and hug her. And everything is followed by xxxooo – as if she can’t string a sentence together if it doesn’t have a big line of hugs and kisses trailing off the end.

Someone really needs to explain to her that Facebook’s real purpose is to keep you amused and distracted when you should be working and to give you the tiniest sense of satisfaction when you ignore a friend request from some girl who was an evil bitch to you in high school.

Wonderful Weekend

I had the most amazing time on the weekend. The Whitlams were phenomenal. Tim Freedman is such a fantastic live singer, I felt like I could have been listening to an album in my own home – I mean, aside from the fact that I was pressed up against a thong of half drunken strangers with barely enough room to sway to the music. That doesn’t usually happen at home.

So my concerns about keeping up with my best friend’s champion drinking ability were well founded - It turns out that I really am a cheap drunk, and that all it takes is 3 beers to get me to a very jolly stage of drunkenness. It might sound a bit sad, but it’s very budget friendly, so I don’t mind too much. It does make me wonder what has changed over the last decade to decrease my tolerance for alcohol, but I’m just going to put it down to the fact that I don’t drink as much as I used to.

The friend who I went to the Whitlams concert with has recently moved into a shared apartment in the city, which is where I spent the night after the show. It’s such a different world to where we live. She lives in a three bedroom apartment, with one very small shared living/dining/kitchen area. It really struck me what a different sort of lifestyle you lead when you live in the middle of the city. Three of them share this one small space – none of them have a car, they catch public transport everywhere. They very infrequently cook, instead eating out most nights. They go out drinking three or four nights a week, they all work odd hours.

Now this might be a weird thing to say, but the apartment sounded really strange. It had that sort of dull nothingness sound – the quiet hum of thick concrete walls and ventilated air. I’m not used to that, because we live in the very outer suburbs where there is a lot of fresh air and light and space - and also a lot of really irritating dogs barking all the time. I expected to ehar a lot of city noise, but there wasn’t really anything at all, just an odd absence of noise with the occasional distant cough coming through.

It was really interesting, because it’s so different from the way KJ and I live, and despite the fact that I don’t think I could ever do it long term, I did enjoy it for the short time that I was there. I liked the convenience of everything. For us it’s a good 30-40 minute drive to get to the city, so if we want to do something different, it’s a big deal rather than just a stroll down the road. It would be nice to be able to find a hundred things to do on a Saturday night all within walking distance.
I might have to go and visit her more often.


I thought I’d leave you with a Whitlams song so that you could get a glimpse of what my awesome weekend was like.