five for friday
It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to update this sorry excuse for a blog.
Every couple of weeks or so, I’ve been writing, deleting, writing, deleting, writing, deleting… But as soon as something sounds self-pitying or too morose, it goes in the bin, and I’m back at square one: a blank screen.
What, if anything, is newsworthy?
On Sundays, I perform the sad little chore of filling my seven-day dispenser with prescription medications and various supplements. It’s the only way I can remember to take them all. (If you’ve ever been prescribed an SNRI—which I have, for migraine management—you’ll know the feeling of having forgotten a dose, as if reality is buffering or re-rendering, your thoughts reduced to mere pixels. If this has ever been you, get yourself a dispenser!) As a marker of discrete intervals of time, the task of filling those rectangular plastic containers seems to come around more often than necessary. Yesterday was the first day of October, meaning the year is now three-quarters gone. Can you believe it? Part of me is relieved; the other part is appalled.
I’ve trying to take things one day at a time and accept life for what it is right now (work work work + strange prednisone dreams), but it scares me, actually—the pace of it, my eye-baggy face in the mirror every morning, the things set in motion long ago that have become decisions I didn’t mean to make. My to-do list often feels as though it comprises a series of impossibilities. Write the impossible memoir. Conceive the impossible baby. Care for the impossible parent. Conquer the impossible workload. Resolve the impossible imposter syndrome. Grow out the horrific fringe I cut a few mornings ago in a moment of sheer lunacy. (It’s giving Lord Farquaad from Shrek meets Angelina Jolie’s Lisa from the film adaptation of Girl, Interrupted. Why I did this a week ahead of Brisbane Writers Festival is beyond me.)
On my dresser, I’ve kept a crumpled piece of lined paper one of my students gave me some weeks ago after I made a gaffe in class that I was upset about. On a page of her notebook, she drew me a flower in biro and wrote, in a loop of pretty cursive, ‘No rain, no flowers.’ I keep thinking about this maxim—and Thich Nhat Hanh’s equivalent: no mud, no lotus—and my sense of its meaning has started to shift.
In the past, I assumed it meant that mud and rain produce the plant, and perhaps that remains the case. But there’s something troublesome about the idea that purpose or meaning must inhere in suffering or that we should always seek to transform our pain into something more sense-making, useful, or beautiful. Perhaps the maxim is more about making room for both mud and lotus.
As Rainer Maria Rilke insists, maybe life is about letting everything happen to you—including the embarrassment of experiencing such rudimentary revelations and sharing them on a public-facing website.
Jokes aside, something I return to when I’m feeling glum or overwhelmed is the promise of all those favourite things I’ve yet to discover. A new book or film could be right around the corner. I love to sneakily Shazam a song that’s playing through the speakers in a shop or café to add to my Apple playlist. There’s never any shortage of recipes to try and fall in love with.
Here’s some stuff I’ve been loving lately.
One. A dear friend lent me her judge’s copy of My Heart at Evening after the Miles Franklin shortlist was announced. I’ve still read only two out of five of the shortlisted titles, but I can understand why this novel was a contender for the top spot. Based on archival research into the suicide of a surveyor based in the harsh northwest of Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1800s, the book is part historical fiction, part murder mystery. It’s written in an epistolary style, in which the protagonist—sent to investigate the circumstances of the surveyor’s death—recounts his time at Circular Head (now Stanley) to his estranged wife. I’d never heard of Konrad Muller before, but his writing is remarkably assured for a debut, gently paced and darkly sensuous despite the bleak realities it depicts: of British colonisation, unspeakable brutality towards people and places, as well as racial and sexual vilification.
Two. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles so much, but the series is addictively compelling from start to finish. When Margo drops out of college after an affair with her English professor, she turns to OnlyFans as a last resort, finding paid employment scarce as a young, single mother. Her dad, a retired wrestler with a history of opioid addiction, moves into her apartment to help cover the rent, while her mother (a single mom herself, wary of Margo repeating history) becomes engaged to an unlikely Christian minister. Chaos ensues as Margo’s online career starts to take flight, and she becomes embroiled in a custody battle for her infant son. The series is tender but unflinching, full of colour, verve, and a sympathetic eye to the woman who’ll do anything to forge a brighter future for her child.
Three. Christine and the Queens would have to be my most listened-to musical act. I stumbled across their cover of INXS’s ‘I need you tonight’ quite by accident, but I replay it whenever I’m home alone and need some background muzak while I cook or clean. It’s a stripped-back version—just vocals against a bass and some light percussion. My husband hates this song, but to me it’s a classic, and this version is as sharp and sexy as Chris’s blazer.
Four. Three shorter pieces I’ve enjoyed reading are ‘In Defence of Useless Arts Degrees’ by Lauren Caroll Harris on Kill Your Darlings, my mate Myles McGuire’s ‘Tokyo Driftless’, free to read at Griffith Review Online; and Hannah Forsyth’s scathing Substack despatch about the inhumane workloads faced by university educators, especially teaching-focused staff.
Five. Tea! I’m rather obsessed with Yorkshire Tea, and I managed to hunt down a couple of new flavoured varieties online (after failing to nab them when I was in the UK, despite my dedicated efforts). Although I was hellbent on trying the sticky toffee brew, it’s actually the Victoria sponge variety I like most; however, the decaf bedtime brew is a long-standing favourite. I wish these were easier to find in Australia—the shipping from the UK doubled the cost of the tea, but it’s a financial hit I’m willing to take.
Over and out. A x
