Like, duh.

While watching “House” one day..

Boyfriend: Eh, how come doctors have to work at night ah?

Me: Because people don’t, you know, conveniently die during working hours?

Vunderbar

This is how I spend my mornings – mentally cursing each and every person who dares hail the tram I am on, and may plagues upon plagues befall you if it results in an unnecessary delay at a red light.

My inability to catch the tram on time is chronic, and apparently incurable; it matters not at all what time I choose to wake up, in fact, I regularly ignore my alarm, which rings at 6, for anywhere between 10 and 60 minutes. This seems to have no effect whatsoever on the inevitable; a helter-skelter dash down the road, bag and lunchbox under one arm, and a much-abused suit jacket under the other, stubbing toes and missing keys, hairpins a-falling and a feeling of utter exhaustion before the day has even properly begun (as it does, you know, at lunchtime).

NO MORE, I said today. Away with the indignity, begone! I will be punctual, and calm and composed – a harmonious ensemble of the very spirit of sophistication and the personification of professionalism.

No more sprinting down the road in fast-laddering stockings, or never-ending gasping. No more scampering down train station escalators, and suicidal leaps for almost-moving trains.

No, today I will be EARLY. I will stride or stroll or amble, I will board the tram with grace, I will catch the train with poise. Today I will arrive at the station at 7:25, and will have a calming 5 minutes to peruse my book, rearrange my hair, and do up the buttons on my jacket (the right way).

And so I did.

The 7:30 train was cancelled.

The 7:42 never showed.

The 7:46 was delayed and finally arrived at 7:52.

…………

I am so sleeping in tomorrow.

A sign(?)

I can no longer conceive of anything new.

Not, at least, without visual aids like smart home expos, peopled with cheery youths enthusiastically explaining to the crowd just why someone would want the Internet on their fridge, or to be able to turn on the lights and oven and heater from their office.

Or glossy-paged catalogues with saucer-eyes-inducing pictures upon pictures, accompanied with raving reviews I can barely understand, and prices which look like typos of the sort where someone leaned a little too heavily on the ‘0’ key.

Music, literature, and art have solidly planted themselves in the modern world, leaving me feeling increasingly lost amongst stranger-friends.

But even, then, these are of things either already been or to come, shortly. The real “new” that eludes me is the kind that now eludes my parents, or theirs, or theirs, or theirs.

I cannot imagine that that will be to computers, what computers are now to abacuses. Planes to kites, F1 cars to horse-drawn carriages, Eminem to the Beatles, Chopin, Strauss, and Bach, miniskirts to hoops and the pantalets beneath, blended goldfish to the Mona Lisa.

This is one of the most compelling reasons for my desire to remain immortal, or, failing which, to assume an unsubstantial form on (physical) death, just to see how different things can get.

Although I can see myself, 50 years from now, being as lost in a world moved on without me as undoubtedly my parents’ parents are now, and being laughed at by thoughtless youths (or whatever word they will be known as) is possibly not the best way to spend all of eternity and therefore possibly the second option is perhaps preferable, albeit far less interactive.

No, I really cannot conceive of anything very new at all.

Must be getting old, eh?

On a darkly lighter note

Have, on extended observation of Boyfriend’s distinctly addict-like love for TV shows, discerned the following to be the most likely to elicit extreme favour on his part.

(Basically, he loves anything, or anyone, like this. Like REALLY loves them.)

1. Small round (or rounded) things that have legs and move – think Ribenaberries, or Smurfs, or the Wheaties from this advertisement on Aussie TV.


2. Extremely dysfunctional people, bitingly sarcastic, incapable of getting along with people and is equally scathing of friends and enemies alike – think House.


3. Spoilt girls with a penchant for occasional dumb blonde behaviour – think Brooke from One Tree Hill or Jessica Simpson (who needs absolutely no explanation, nor the word “occasional”.)

Does this worry anyone as much as it worries me?

Nothing more than

Mental flashbacks may be bad enough, but emotional ones are simply frustrating in their utter lack of substance. Feelings hit me out of the blue, sourceless and fleeting. Stabs of sudden longing, but for what? Momentary elation, twinges of fragments of feelings I can’t even begin to describe. (One was something like how [not what] you feel when running fingers over wet plates, and that’s just the start.)

It’s like when you get snippets of tunes in your head, but can’t quite remember the song, and before you can try, you’ve forgotten the melody, and you spend the rest of the day humming tonelessly to yourself.

They aren’t memories; there are no accompanying visions, and it isn’t even déjà vu.

No, they are little prods to the heart, spontaneous flickers of “Now why did I feel that? Hang on, feel what? Oh shit”.

And they’re driving me MAD.

My World

*msn: melancholiaismyfriend

I taught you words as pictures, my mother tells me, happily, mystifyingly.

I used flashcards, you know? Cards got words, but no pictures! Not like the other parents!

No, not like the other parents.

I remember those flashcards; plain black handwritten letters on faded white cardboard she got cheap because it was old. No, I had no pretty coloured pictures, where cars were round-roofed and red, and cats were fat with beaming smiles and squiggly whiskers that almost twirled as you watched.

No, not at all – to me a cat was a cat not a doodled orange blob and it looked like this:

CAT.

And that was that and nothing would ever be the same again. Scrawling letters and walls of print were my first and greatest loves. I was my mother’s daughter – no pictures for MY books, I said – I resented the space they took up that words and more words could have filled, words that painted far prettier pictures in my head than any other could.

This is, perhaps, why I’d rather read TV transcripts than watch the shows. Why I’m content to read of far-off lands and stay placidly at home. Why my favourite songs are still the ones with words that I can sing to. (How uncultured! Shudder, you.)

There are even people I have loved (and some that I still do) for their conversation alone, regardless of how they looked or acted.

[It’s only words, but words are all you need to take my heart away.]

And so I live in a world of words, and if each picture is worth a thousand, and every word a picture to me, then I am rapt, wrapped in a swirling sea of thousands upon thousands of tumbling letters, strung into the best of sentence-songs.

This, then, is the root of the great sorrow I feel at being a unilinguist. That I am blind to the million worlds that dance their way through a literary universe.

I grieve, I really do, that I will never see the pictures these foreign wordsmiths paint. I will never hear the music in the singing of their words. Translations are but mocking rippled window panes, and the beauty is forever lost.

This, this is why I read all I can (and more) – to make the most of all within my reach, and to help me forget the stars I’ll never see.



[all suggestions for much-needed fixes welcome.]

In Case of Silliness

You know how you’re supposed to put a contact number into your phone and label it I C E, you know, In Case of Emergencies? So people know which number to call if they find you (and your phone, obviously) passed out or dead or in pieces (and dead)?

I remembered this long enough today to put in Boyfriend’s number and had to resist the extremely powerful urge to add “(ice baby)”.

NO. No. Must...resist...emergencies are SERIOUS matters.

Not to mention people might just let me die for being revoltingly lame.

Twitchy fingers are silly (and potentially deadly) tools.

Discovery

We were…talking one night (gossip is an ugly, ugly word. I mean really. Look at it.) and mildly indulging in the “what-if” game – “What if…then what would you do?” etc., except about other people. (“What if so so did that that, d’you think so so so would do this and that?”)

Because, you know, there is only so many times I can ask Boyfriend what he’d do if my breasts fell off. (“Or just one side! Or if I lost my feet! Or an eye! Or *gasp* my voice! Like permanently!”)

I had to stop after the last one because he said it’s just not nice to give people false hopes.

Pah.

Anyway.

In the midst of conversation, Boyfriend made a statement so biting it shocked me.

     Me: That was…mean.

     Boyfriend: Yeah, but it was true.

And it was.

Those who do not know him may not understand the magnitude of this revelation: Boyfriend can be mean.

How…delicious.

It’s like biting into a bland oatmeal cookie, and finding a thick, gooey fudgey centre.

Oozing.

Yummy.

Friday hurts

Fridays hurt. Not just the bursting feeling in my chest as I watch the seconds slowly drip away, or the counting-yet-not-counting down to the beginning of Friday Night and The Rest Of The Weekend, or even the urge to simply yell when the numbers in the bottom right-hand corner just don’t change fast enough.

No. It’s that every twinge, every ache, every secret inward gleeful grin at the appearance of that magical number “5” in the hour is, really, nothing much more than a cacophonous counterpoint to the small and sadly serious voice, speaking softly;

Surely, surely, there is more to life than waiting for it to begin.

[I’m a whiner, really. It’s not all bad, especially when you think about it – I spent 3 hours last Friday after lunch bouncing on a giant Pilates ball, and had colleagues who not only laughed and disapproved not one whit, but one in particular who bounced right along with me.

It’s just that, you know, it’s Sunday night, and next weekend is ever so far away.]

Faith is

No one believes me when I tell them this, except for Boyfriend but that’s because he knows I don’t lie about my weirdness – it’s a principle. (There’s also no point, because people find out eventually.)

When I was young, one of the shows I actually watched regularly was Scooby Doo. And never, not once, did I ever realize that it was ALWAYS going to be the bad guys pretending to be ghosts to scare people off as part of some master plan that “would’ve worked, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids”.

Every single episode I watched, I watched with bated breath and cold, forgotten food on my lap, as I believed, over and over, that the ghosts this time were real, and the villains simply incidental.

Some (cynical) days I wonder if my believing in the basic good in people, my tightly-held conviction that decency is not extinct, is but a grown-up version of those feelings.

But, like that kid who refused to give up on her show, who refused to accept the unoriginality of it all, I refuse to renounce my faith. There IS good in everyone. There IS universal “milk of human kindness”. There IS chivalry, dammit.

But most of all, I believe there is a point in anyone, once reached, where they will do the Right Thing simply because they cannot bring themselves to do anything but.

I have to believe, that even in the most despicable of monsters, there is some spark yet uncorrupted. That they were young once, and innocent. That no one is born to evil, and that there is always hope for the fallen.

Call me weird (some have) or stupid (many more), but there. I could not believe otherwise if I tried – it would be much too painful, and to live with that belief…wouldn’t want to. At all.