The ability to enjoy coffee from an actual cup
Yeah, I don’t know what was wrong with me either, but somehow drinking my coffee from paper cup with a sippy lid just made it taste so much better.
I have acquired an appretiation for white wine
Before this white wine was for girls who were blonde, wore fake tan and were into ‘clubbing’. I thought it tasted like sour water. Now Im less judgemental about what people do with their bodies or spare time. And I’ve found that a good white is awesome on a hot day or with fish.
I now care about how my alcoholic drinks taste
Gone are the days of $4 clean-skins from the sale rack. Now it’s $6 clean-skins from the sale rack.
My hangovers are more than just a morning thing now
Oh god, the pain I have felt, the suffering. This makes me feel the oldest. Maybe I should advance to $10 clean-skins from the sale rack
My metaboilism can no longer handle doughnuts as a main meal
I did this when I went to Japan and actually came back thinner . Good times.
I am no longer facinated by Ikea
Can I hear a hallelujah? I know my mum will be proud of me for this one.
I am facinated by bagels
Clearly these last two were a direct trade off. My twitter account has me on record declaring my undying love for doughnut shaped boiled bread.
Way back when I was in Barcelona in April last year I suffered from a serious bout of home sickness and loneliness. My tour had ended four days earlier, I had spent the previous three wandering to places I had visited with the tour and wanted a better look at. That morning though I woke up and suddenly really didn’t want to struggle though that day.
I really struggled with not being able to communicate with others properly. To understand and be understood. I had just past 2 weeks of misunderstandings and apologetic smiles, I’d had enough. I guilted myself out of bed (you’re in Barcelona! get your ass out of bed), narrowly got in for last servings of breaky at the hotel. Moped along the Moll d’Espanya and around Bari Gothic feeling entirely miserable. Miserable that I couldn’t speak, miserable that I was alone, miserable that I was miserable, ad infiatum…
My last few days there were a compete sook fest. Here’s a photo of me at a cafe in Port Vell looking like a prize emo.
I wandered around that beautiful city in a complete daze.
And at the airport, I was relieved. I was going home. This horrible feeling in my head would have no reason to be there and I could go back to normal.
29 hours of transit later and I feel worse. Much worse. And everything hung on me, everything made me feel worse. The customs men told me off for the undeclared half of a mars bar in my carry on (the other half was eaten in Singapore). My parents mucked up the time my plane landed so there was no one to pick me up. My room had been packed up and prettified for the impending house sale. Phil was away in South America and I felt like I had no home any more.
So, I spent a good 2 days in bed. Even if I wanted to be awake I couldn’t be. Turns out I get terrible jetlag.
I think the biggest thing about this very short phase was how much I didn’t want anyone to know about it. Even afterwards, I was complely convinced of two things; that talking about it would make it ‘real’ and a problem, and that people would look down on me for being depressed. I mean really, what did I have to be sad about – I was on holiday, in Barcelona and I’d just bought 3 pairs of awesome shoes.
It was embarrassing.
I mean, there are folks out there who don’t even know how to spell Barcelona.
I didn’t talk to anyone about it, just slept, ate and floated around my house. Went to work and floated around there too.
Then one morning I went for a run.
The sun wasn’t up yet, the sky was clear – I could see the stars. I ran along the beach and the bay was glassy, there was no wind, no chill in the air. It was my first run since coming back.
I absolutely glided along the pavement, I may as well have had wings. And when I got back home, I was sweaty and tired but my funk had gone.
Just like that.
• • •
This post was originally inspired by the Plinky Prompt “If you could get any tattoo for just a week, what would it be?”. At around this time I was reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The story has a small tangent about a Jewish folk tale . The crux of which is the the question “What object can make a joyous man miserable, but a miserable man joyous…” and the answer “A ring with the engraving ‘
‘ (This too shall pass)”. The phrase became a bit of a mantra for me at this time. The tattoo would be the previously mentioned Hebrew phrase around the base of my right hand index finger.
I love going out to eat, and I do quite a bit. It’s one of the perks of being a twenty-something-spoilt-rotten-gen-y-brat-with-a-disposable-income.
Lately I’ve been intriuged by what’s left on plates at the end of a meal. As a kid, mum would absolutely insist that I eat everything on my plate. These days Im not growing so much, and serving sizes kind of are. So I feel a little weird leaving stuff on the plate when Im done, especially when I’ve paid for it. There’s this little fight inside my brain; the parts of me that my mum made and my being cheap vs. the parts of me that aren’t hungry, backed up by the parts of me that value my being on the non side of fat.
To cope with this very important internal conflict, I occasionally take a photo of my leftovers.
An unforeseen bonus from this little slice of crazy is that I remember my meals and the venues better. Actually, the whole day falls out of my memory clearer , I don’t even need to be looking the photo.
PS: Hey yay! Im writing in my blog! What the hell? Friend of mine said she’d link to me if I updated regular like. I promise to try.
I had a little bit of a magical Saturday this weekend. One of those first day of summer holidays days; you wake up and the possibilities of what could be done stretch before you in a landscape of gold and ruby prettiness.
And since Im one of those people who count sleeping in a gift from above, this Saturday I slept in. Gloriously snoozed as the birds woke up, had a shower, fed the kids. jumped into their trees and sang until I was gently awake.
The original plans for Saturday were built around the need for Phil to go into the city to fix up his car registration due to his laptop blowing up the night before. However on waking it was discovered that dates were read poorly and that the car would keep for one more week.
Being liberated from our original task put us on the spot, we were showered, dressed, but had no car rego to fix. So being the creative sparks we are and being tired of all our local breakfast haunts, we decided to bop into the city anyway.
This decision found us in the shiny, but mostly empty Docklands. It’s an area designed for huge crowds. But as huge crowds don’t inhabit the area on generic Saturday mornings, it was mostly ours.
We cruised the breakfast choices along the waterfront for a little while, marveling at the pretty architecture, ugly architecture, and general emptiness of the place until happening on a shiny place overhanging the water.
For this part of our journey, all there is to say is NOM NOM NOM. Phil had the big breakky, I had the BLT. Then we waddled out.
I let the universe know that a tram right about nowish would be really convenient, as over breakfast we had decided to go check out a fancy suit for phil in a fancy spot on the other side of town. And lo, I turned around, an a tram with a destination matching ours trundled into view, giving us just the right amount of time to get ourselves and our full stomachs to the tram stop.
We inspected the suit but decided that it would have looked much better with a pin stripe rather than a check. Meandering through various lane ways, I exclaimed ‘where are we’ and ‘I’ve never been here before’ so many times I may as well have been in another country.
The giant empty place, walking around the alley and the giant breakfast had made us weary, so we turned our sails from home and hopped on a train.
Hopping off a stop too soon so we could stroll in the sun. I spied a chalk arrow on the ground.
“I feel like playing follow the arrows”
To wit Phil spun me in the direction of the arrow and we walked heads down in search of the next one. We had found 5 when we saw the pub in the distance and Phil mused that if the arrows lead there we would just have to stop for a beer. One or two more arrows in the right direction and we were there, and yes, there were chalk arrows pointing into the pub door.
‘But they’re drawn in a different stye” I cried.
“Dosn’t matter, the arrows say beer”
I checked for more arrows in the right direction.
“Did you set this up?”
But Phil replied in the negative.
We sat outside in the sun watching the traffic, sipping beer and musing about nothing much. After letting the day and the beer soak in, we picked ourselves up and wandered home.