Story of my life

Somehow today I've come to be thinking about speeches at birthday parties and weddings. Perhaps because of the movie that was on when I got home from dinner out. At the end of The Wedding Date, Debra Messing gives a singularly uninspired speech. "There's nobody who knows how to love my baby sister like you do. Be good to each other." Or words to that effect, at any rate. It made me tank back to the last time there was any chance of someone making a speech about me. Someone who at least should have known me really well. It was probably my 21st. There have been occasional speechifying moments since then, but nothing nearly as major. I avoided the massive party that usually goes with that birthday. I was the last of my friends to reach the milestone and the thought of combining hard drinking friends with my teetotal family was something I was not prepared to confront. But I was also concerned about the speeches. I was secretly glad that there weren't too many stories to be told about me that could in any way embarrass me. I loved the idea that my life was so private it was known to only me. Of course, my ideas on this have changed now. I think of the lack of friends able to tell stories about me and wonder why I've spent a lifetime keeping people at bay, what I did with my friends that they would have no stories about me. One of my oldest friends was trying to come up with stories about me not that long ago, someone I've known for almost 20 years now, and she came up blank. Or she claimed to. And we've shared a lot in that time. I have countless stories about her. So is it that I haven't lived? That I've spent my entire life on the fringes? That I'm simply not memorable? To tell the truth, if any of these theories are true, I'm horrified. I know my life hasn't exactly been the stuff that dreams are made of. But I don't want it to be so unremarkable that even the people who have shared it with me don't remember my part in it. There is another theory for why people don't tell stories about me, though. And I think I'm going to stick with this one. As CC Bloom tells Hilary in Beaches, "My memory is long, very long." I remember all of their stories, even the ones they would rather I didn't share. And I have a better capacity for alcohol than most of them, which only helps the memories. I still hold out hope that my memory bank of retaliatory ammunition is all that keeps the stories back, not that there are none to tell. Dear god, let that be the reason...

A pocketful of happy

The weather here has finally taken a turn for the better. A false start a few weeks back was followed by some of the more miserable weather Melbourne has to offer. Howling winds, spring thunderstorms, hail, rain, and cold. Perhaps not London cold, but enough that I was back in my winter wardrobe after a brief flirtation with spring.

But last week saw the mercury rise a little. Not soar, no, but hover in a pleasant range. The winds died and the sun put in cameo appearances. It was time for the spring clothes to emerge once more. And I, for one, am extremely glad of it, but not for the reasons you might think.

Yes, I enjoy the warmer months of the year, although generally not spring. I think it's safe to say that no hay fever sufferer will endure a Melbourne spring voluntarily without contemplating a move somewhere else during the brief moments when they are free from the haze inducing allergies that hold them prisoner for three months of the year. But summer, sure. I'm only human. I prefer to be warm rather than cold. But it wasn't climate that had me smiling one afternoon last week as I shrugged into my lightweight linen jacket, just before heading out of work for the day.

It wasn't even that daylight saving has arrived, bringing with it the joyous moment of changing from work clothes into pyjamas during daylight hours (what can I say, I'm a slob, and not ashamed to admit it).

The moment of pure bliss came when I fished into the jacket pocket for my car key. I'd dropped it in there that morning, one less thing to carry as I juggled office keys, handbag, lunch bag and laptop from the car to the office. The steps I have to negotiate to get into the fish bowl are not steep, but they carry hidden puddles for the unwary in open shoes. Getting the keys out to drive up the road for lunch, I noticed that there was something else in the pocket. I didn't remember putting anything else in there, so I was naturally curious. I find all sorts of things hidden in the pockets of clothes, sometimes before they go in the washing machine, sometimes after. Feeling the paper-ish crinkle of this, I assumed it was a receipt and twisted it from the pocket fully intending to just throw it in the bin. I'm so glad I looked at it first, though.

It was $50.

There is nothing more welcome than an injection of funds in the week before pay day. I wasn't down to brass tacks but I could certainly see the last farthing on the horizon, and it was coming up with a rush. A fifty made me feel rich, like winning the lottery - or rather like winning one of the smaller prizes in the lottery. It was a brilliant warmth in my stomach, a buzzing lightheaded sensation. It was bliss. And yes, I'm fully aware of just how pathetic it seems to be so overjoyed by the appearance of a note that can be withdrawn from an ATM, assuming you have the cash in your account in the first place. And therein lies the reason for my excitement. I had no cash available to me. My lunch run was going to be to the supermarket, because all I had available was a denomination too small to be removed at an ATM. Like I said, the week before pay week. It's almost always a diet of baked beans that week, even when it's not a month where I've moved house, booked flights for a Christmas trip, and paid off my car rego. No wonder fifty dollars seemed like finding the welcome stranger.

I spent the rest of the afternoon merrily plotting not only how to spend it (anything that wasn't sensible, really), but thinking on where it could have come from. I wasn't sure when I'd last worn the jacket. I knew it had been some time this year, but I couldn't say if I'd ever put my hands in the pockets. Some good fairy, evening out the karma stakes a little? Making up for the torrent of crap that rains over my desk at work every single day? Or perhaps a visit from a leprechaun who had been through the currency exchange on his way into the country? A parting gift from the old flatmate, as a reward for being "the best flatmate ever", for simply being clean, not hogging the bathroom, and not being smelly?

It was almost the end of the day when my reverie was brought to a mundane end. I remembered when I'd last worn the jacket, and where the money had come from. Turns out, I'd worn it to Mum's birthday dinner, and the cash was the payment from my brother for his share of her present.

I think I prefer the karma fairy. But I can still hold out hope that she's out there somewhere, just trying to find her way through the crap.

The art of visiting

I've been playing host to a house guest for the past week. I like to think I've been a pretty good host - provided spare keys so they can come and go as they please, directions at any time of day, suggestions for what to do, and three days of escorted touring that has added about 600km to the mileage on my almost-new car - at hefty cost in fuel considering that it's Christmas. Most important of all, I have taken her along to my family Christmas, making sure that she wasn't orphaned for the day. I have taken her to my friends' Christmas, including buying a Kris Kringle present for her so that she didn't feel left out. I have cooked for her on no less than three occasions, two of them after having been at work all day.

In return, I have had the pleasure of her company, received a bottle of booze, and had my dishes washed twice (although apparently, finding the place where everything goes was a little too much work). I have had my shower clogged with her hair, I have had my bathroom sprayed with water, my tap twisted out of alignment, my spare bedroom made into a bigger sty than I ever managed, every power point touched left switched on, every light in the flat on at various times, a hissy fit chucked when I dared to suggest that on Boxing Day perhaps I might see some of MY friends that I haven't caught up with for Christmas instead of trekking all the way down to the frigging Mornington Peninsula for her to see some friends of her aunt's who she met when she was 20. You'll notice, the one thing I haven't received - any sign of thanks.

I know I won't comment, but I have almost ripped her head off on several occasions, the best one being when she insisted that she knew my mother MUST have a particular cleaning product in the house, in spite of me knowing that she never used the stuff. My knowledge of my mother's house cleaning habits was, of course, inferior, because she dived under the sink and came out with the product in question, and a very smug look on her face (turns out that kitchen benches must be cleaned with disinfectant before dishes can be stacked on them - wiping them with a damp cloth simply won't do). Not sure she noticed it later when Mum picked up the bottle of cleaner and asked where that had come from, because she didn't know she had it. I'm also incapable of even folding my own laundry. A trip to the loo before sorting things into a state that she considered appropriate for them was too big a delay for her. I came out to find her folding my underpants, and not listening when I did everything short of swear at her to get her to bugger off and leave my clothes alone. If I'd wanted to move them, I would have done it myself, as soon as I was out of the loo. We've been mates for a while, but we're hardly at the point where it's fine to fold each other's undies.

Earlier today, when someone cut in front of me as they got on the freeway, and I benefited from the wonderful joy of her driving instruction, about how she would have acted. Me having my foot on the brake was not enough of a response, apparently. I should have changed lanes. I should have done this, I should have done that, because this delightful guest of mine is always in the right, and can never concede that she might be wrong - although she has proven to be so quite a few times. I should know all of this. In fact, I did know it before she arrived, but it had never been brought home quite so strongly to me before. Or maybe it had, during some of the weeks that we spent working together on hotels in the UK. I remember seething with resentment quite often, but knowing that me venting any of it could very well lead to a stand-up fight, so I always swallowed the bile that rushed to spill out of my mouth. And I've done it again this time, biting back the words that I want to say, the times when I can feel the steam about to blow the top of my head off. Or more likely, the top of her head. I'm not known among my closest friends and family for my subtlety, but I'm not close enough to this one that I will blow my top openly. So I seethe and plot revenge, instead.

But if she thinks I won't repay the favour of being the world's most annoying house guest by visiting her in Brisbane in 2011, she can have another think. Of course, I can't chuck a tanty when she doesn't dessert friends and family during the holiday season to chauffeur me around town - her family is still back in South Africa - but I can make life difficult for her. I can run up her power bills, her water bills, I can be messy, I can sit around and watch her prepare dinner after a day at work. I can give her advice on how she should be doing things, I can correct her every thought, wilfully misunderstanding her, and never giving an inch in an argument even when the people involved are talking about completely separate issues. I can do all of this.

The question is, can I do all of that and still keep the friend? I think not, on the whole. And the annoying part is, when she's not being the world's biggest know-it-all, she's great fun. It's just that at close quarters, the fun gets buried in the pedantic crap that she also spews, and the fact that you realise she doesn't know half as much as she thinks she does. I can't see the friendship lasting long-term, in all honesty. But I'll be damned if I give it up before I get a weeks free room, board and transportation in Brisbane.

So you think you can...

...Write.
Well yes, actually, there is the occasional day when I'm pretty sure I can write. There are days in between when I'm convinced of my general crapness, certain that I can barely string together a sentence. People who get emails from me will know all about those days, the ones where I take all the words I want to say and just throw them up in the air to see where they land. I like to think of it as free form sentence structure, much the way my word inventions (witness:crapness, found in no dictionary I know of) are driving language forward; purists call it gibberish. One day I'm sure that someone will recognise the almost Joyce-ian genius of it. After all, they thought his novel-without-punctuation idea was pretty kooky at first, too.

The days when I know I can write are the days when I use a lot of adverbs. I like adverbs. In fact, I love them. Lovely, cheerfully, merrily, disgustingly, horrifically, mercifully. It is one of my favourite kinds of words. I've been known to write sentences without a single verb, with barely a noun, but with plenty of adverbs. On days when I feel ten feet tall and invincible, I scatter them with gay abandon - gaily, even - throughout my fiction. But apparently, this is the wrong thing to do. According to the experts, they should be used sparingly - that's their adverb, not mine. So lately, on the days when I believe everything they tell me about how to write, when I don't trust my own instincts, I go through and take them out. I strip ever single word that ads something descriptive to a noun. If it ends in -ly, it gets culled. I'm trying to be ruthless, really I am. And it has its advantages, too. Like at the moment, when I'm trying to do NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Today is day 3 and I'm ahead of the curve, so I'm optimistic about reaching the word count. Part of this is because of just how many more words are involved in saying 'a tone full of doubt' than just a simple 'doubtfully'. But the experts know best, after all.

Or so they would have us believe. Because the experts would get rid of all the fun in language. I know plenty of people who use adverbs when they speak. Are they saying that we should get rid of them in speech as well as writing? And shouldn't writing be all about finding an individual voice? Because if we make everything uniform, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more bland. Instant grey. Why read a book if you could have those thoughts, in that voice, in your own well-ordered mind? Personally, I like something a little more disorderly. Which might explain my liking of fluff-literature, as I consider it; fluff is all about the exuberant over statement.

Besides, if you iron all the quirks out of literature, you lose something delightful. Like the man in the shop I go to for my caffeine supplies at work. He recognises me now and even raises a half smile, no longer the surly morose individual who would barely grunt the total to me after pinging the cash register when he saw me pull yet another bottle of Coke from his drinks fridge. Now, I not only get a hint of smile, a hello, a nod, but once I've given over my money, I get a wonderful little gem of English-as-a-second-language that should never be wiped out: rather than just the ordinary, 'Thanks', he delivers up the delightful, 'Thank you please.' It might sound like I'm patronising his English; I'm not. I have seen him have conversations with people in languages I don't know enough to recognise anything about other than there being more than one of them. I know from experience that my own understanding of languages other than my own is sadly lacking. But I challenge the experts to keep English evolving, keep it going in the way it has for centuries as it steals from other languages, is innovated by people with the strength of will and personality to impose their own speech patterns on those around them. I challenge the experts to keep the intuitively, delightfully unique in the language.

And yes, today I think I can write. Tomorrow? Meh, who can tell?