Laundry (or Llaundry, for welsh readers)

I've been living in my apartment for a year (from tomorrow) and I go through phases where I don't like it. There's something strange about the building; I think it was originally a hotel of some kind and the apartments do have a vaguely hotelish character to them (there's a vestigal slot on the wall as you come in to my apartment where, I assume, you'd put your keytag to operate the lights and whatnot). About half the apartments in the building are in fact let out as serviced apartments, and so the inhabitants of the building fall neatly into either of two categories: permanents (like me) and transients. The transients are usually european (there seems to be a bit of a skew towards eastern and southern europe), we never get north americans. I don't mind the vaguely hotelish character of the place - it makes it seem a bit more like something out of a novel, and besides, I've had some of the great experiences of my life in hotel rooms.

The place does have an aural quirk - as you get out of the elevator on my floor and stand in the hallway, you can hear quite clearly what's going on in each apartment. It's very disconcerting. Once I'm in my apartment I can't hear anything, it's just when you're in the hallway. This used to worry me quite a bit.


My apartment's on the top floor, overlooking a little park. It's very light and fairly quiet. That's why I like it. I lived once in a very dark apartment and it nearly drove me around the twist. At the bottom of the building is a coffee shop which people who live around here usually call 'the lesbian coffee shop' but it's not. It was at some point in the past, and the name's stuck. Everyone knows it's not, but we still call it that. I think it appeals to our longing to live in a raffish demimonde sort of place. There's a reason we're here, not Mosman. When I first moved here the guy who then ran the lesbian coffee shop took an instant dislike to me (maybe just to save time?) I still don't know what I did wrong. But I've outlasted him now, he's gone somewhere else - prison, i hope, in New Zealand - and the new people are quite agreeable.

The building has a shared laundry in the basement, student-style. I don't have a particular problem with that as a concept, but some people don't seem to get it. There are two washing machines and three dryers. The washing machines take 30 minutes, and it's written very clearly in great big letters. (You can see where this is going, I know.) So people put their stuff in, leave and.... don't come back!

Here's the quandry. I go down to do my laundry. I have a very busy life and I don't need extra complications. Sometimes I get down there, the machines are busy.. fine. I wait, come back later (or just go and buy new underwear, it's easier). But sometimes the machines are cold and idle.. then when you lift up the lid, they're full of clothes! I overthink things, so I start to wonder. Has the machine just finished like a second ago, in which case for me to huffily take it all out and put it somewhere would seem unreasonable, prissy... weird? I notice as I think this through that it's women's underwear and stuff and I don't want some angry bint coming in and accusing me of being a pervert (which I'm not, or at least not in that way).

So I leave it.. then I come back 15 or 20 minutes later. It's still there! I start imagining the conversation that will occur when I start to put the clothes somewhere else and the woman comes in:

her: oi.. what are you doing?
me (defensivey): i'm emptying the washing machine.. there was stuff in it.. i wasn't sure...
her: but i was just about to come down and do that, how dare you..
me: well how was i to know you were 'just about to come down'? what if you were another hour? is there some point at which you'd consider it ok for me to do this? or is it an ironlcad rule that noone can mess with your stuff even if you leave it there all afternoon?

Luckily I've never had to have this conversation, I suspect I'd play it very badly. Must go....dryer time!

Salt

I read somewhere recently that Princess Margaret used to call cocaine "Naughty salt". As I write this I'm almost hysterical with tiredness, I really must sleep sometime. (And no, it's nothing to do with the salt.)

Roots

I'm from Melbourne but live in Sydney. I'm in Sydney most of the time but I do spend quite a bit of time in Mebourne, at least every second weekend. Someone quite recently was asking me which of the two cities I felt most at home in, and I gave some vague answer mostly to the effect that I'm happier in Sydney.

He then asked whether I had more roots in Sydney than in Melbourne now. I said with a straight face "definitely Sydney". I very nearly lost it, but you'll be pleased to hear I managed to keep (most of) my composure. I expect that non-Australian readers will be scratching their heads now. Don't worry, it's a localism.

Call me 'General'

I just overheard a colleague talking on the phone and using the expression 'general consensus'. I wince, it's a tautology. As is 'mass exodus'. You have been warned!

Along these lines, I heard something described as 'a panacea for all our problems'. Same. Am I too delicate for this world? I told someone recently that I majored in Pedantics at Berkeley (a line from a Woody Allen movie, if I'm not mistaken). They believed me.

I'm feeling vaguely seedy today and very tired. I had a 'breakfast martini' with my friend V last night and no, before you ask, it's not a euphemism. Then up at 0525 to get the 0645 to Melbourne. It's going to be a long day. Nothing a stuffed roti wouldn't fix (again, not a euphemism).

Lady

I see someone stumbled across my blog as a result of tying in google (and I notice it's google uk): my lovely older lady

I'm not sure why, but this really tickles me. I do have some issues with the word 'lady' anyway (see a much earlier posing about adult dating sites) and one has a bit of pathos too. My friend E once released a record which he was going to call "Music is my special lady" but he was persuded by some pinhead to change the name. D'oh!

Rehab

At the suggestion of my friend E I bought Amy Winehouse's CD. It's great, as he said. And what I like about it is that it's shamelessly derivative and at the same time, strikingly original.

new iPod

I had a lucky break today, my old ipod mini finally gave up! A lot of people have never even seen an iPod mini so I felt like I was carrying around something that was steam-powered, but it's served me very well over the last 3 or so years. I was listening to it this morning at the station when I ran into someone I know (avid readers - are there any? - will remember my 4-cocktail bender with 4 women a week or so ago). I couldn't resist showing her that the very song I was listening to was, in fact, by me.

Anyway, just after lunch it decided to stop working. So I immediately went to the shop to buy a new one. It's a lovely blue Ipod nano, pretty much the same blue as my old mini. Back then I got matching his'n'hers, my wife's (I was married then) was pink. I sometimes used to sneak stuff onto her ipod to see if she reacted. I put Anthony and the Johnsons' "Fistful of love" on it, and after about a month she asked me if there was some message behind me doing that. I also gave my 9yo son a good collection of Brian Jonestown Massacre, Leonard Cohen and Thelonius Monk. He lost his ipod shortly thereafter.

Mmmmmm! I'm now loading it up, with what a charming young lady who recently visited described as "one third hard-core country, one third David Bowie and one third just plain weird stuff". Which is pretty accurate.

Bach

I was at a piano recital this afternoon (yes, I susprised you, didn't I!), a very intimate affair, and the first thing the guy played sounded very much like Bach but also in a funny way wasn't Bach, there was something a little not-exactly-18th-century about some of the harmonies, but it was very compelling. Anyway, the pianist said it was Bach.

I tackled him at the interval and said how much I loved the Bach piece and how it surprised me because it had a harmonic richness that you wouldn't normally expect in Bach (and yes, I was aware as I was saying it how cringe-inducing the phrase 'harmonic richness' is). He said yes, Bach does have this great emotional density and whatnot, but then said that he had, in fact, put in a few extra notes. Well you can imagine how chuffed I was to hear that - I'd sort of picked it. Whatta stud! On an amusing trivia note, the pianist was the guy whose hands were playing the Rachmaninoff in 'Shine' when Geoffrey Rush was at the piano. Not that I saw the movie, of course.

Putting it off.

It occurred to me that I've undergone a major conceptual shift in the way I think about putting things off. Let me explain...

I live alone now, after 12 years. And, for example, if there's dishes that need to be done (which itself is a pretty rare thing, I'm such a bachelor) I look at them, lying accusingly on the bench (the dishes, not me. I've only ever lain on the bench once, under circumstances you don't need to know about), and I think "I could do them now, or I could do them later". The me of 12 years ago would have been happy to leave them, but I think that I've finally come to understand a fundamental fact about the universe and our place in it: doing something later isn't actually the same as not doing it all. It sounds obvious, but I didn't really get it before, I guess at some level I assumed that if I didn't do them now it was somehow equivalent to getting someone else to do them. But I remind myself sometimes if I can feel this slipping. Who exactly am I expecting to sneak into my apartment and do the things I've put off? Maria Callas? Zsa Zsa Gabor? The Bush twins? Actually, the last one is quite appealing. I had an acqaintance who was a professional dominatrix and would, in fact, have people come in and vacuum and tidy and whatnot, naked. But I can't see that happening.

Watery laptop

In the course of a very fitful and not-long-enough sleep (I have a bit too much going on at the moment, I'm too excited to sleep) I had a dream where for some reason I was outside by the pool - not sure which pool, or whose, but I was there - carrying my two laptops. The two were both closed, and stacked one upon the other. Both were on. I do in fact have two laptops, and in a crushingly obvious metaphor for my life they serve two different functions. One's the Good one (work stuff, music, photos, garageband), the other's the Bad one (you don't need to know much about that one).

There was a shallow water feature, about 6 inches to a foot deep. I was tired and distracted (even in the dream) and so I put the laptops down, into the water while I was about to do something else. As I did so, I realised that I'd, in fact, put them into water, and that that was definitely not a good thing for a computer. Cursing (thinking of the money, and all the files and stuff on them) I hauled them out.

I started with the Bad laptop first (and I'm trying not to read too much into this) and I prised off the keyboard and shook all the water off it, turned it upside down and shook it. The indicator lights were still on, which was a bit of a surprise.

Err.. and I can't remember what happened then. But there you go. I'm trying this on the Bad laptop, which is a bit unusual for me. Enjoy.

Sunday Papers

From time to time, I peruse various dating sites, and I'm struck by how many people say that they really enjoy lying in bed and reading the Sunday newspapers. Ladies, it's Sydney!

Legless

I was out on a cocktail bar crawl last night with some women (a setup that I can't help but find mildly titillating, even though there was nothing like that involved) and I had a bit of an epiphany. Cocktails are great - you get a bit giddy and excited but not full or messy as you do with beer, which has been up to now my preferred drink. I had 4 cocktails and when I got home (which was only 10pm) I was staggering about talking to myself.

A truly excellent evening! And I don't feel too bad, so far. Nothing breakfast and a coffee wouldn't fix. One of the fun things about being the only man in a group with 4 women is that they don't moderate their conversation as much as they would if there were more men present, so as we had more and more cocktails the conversation slowly but inexorably got raunchier and raunchier. It's probably the alcohol talking, but sometimes I start to think I really am getting to understand women (this is a dangerous and foolhardy train of thought, I know).

Columbia pussies

I was reading a story today about the vanishing idea of free speech on campuses and they mentioned the story about the men's hockey team at Columbia being suspended after putting up a flier on campus encouraging men to turn out for hockey, which included the line "Stop being a pussy".

This reminded me, when I was at Columbia (about a thousand years ago now) I had a girlfriend who was on the men's lacrosse team.

Dinner

Too much food and too little sleep - I'm feeling very lethargic. Dinner last night with an ex (no, not that one) at a great place in South Yarra. No menu, they just ask what sort of stuff you like and don't like, then the chef whips something up.

The waitress took a dislike to us, I think we confused her. Understandable really.

The previous night I'd been out for dinner with an old friend who was telling me she'd met the love of her life. She's overjoyed and it sounds like the real deal. She won't tell me who it is, but I figured it out. Food was terrible.

Lunch yesterday at The Melbourne Club, which was quite agreeable. What I liked was that it made me feel like a youngster.

Empty.

Tonight I handed the kids back to my ex, on her return from the US. I'd been living in her house for 8 days, hanging out with the kids on school holidays.

As always, I find myself feeling very spent and empty after handing them back. It really shouldn't be a surprise, this happens every time. But it's the same - I feel guilty elation at finally getting rid of them, then a horrible strange sadness as I shake myself and try to remember what the rest of of my life's like, the bits where I'm not doing laundry, cooking, playing, trying to stop them killing each other. It's made worse by my having to stay here in Melbourne for a few days, and even though I say I love Melbourne it makes me sad and confused - I don't know many people here, I'm sort of homeless. And I can't escape the feeling when I'm here that my life's gone nowhere, I'm back where I started.

So by 7 o'clock tonight I'd handed the kids back but was left feeling profoundly sad and uneasy. I drove about aimlessly for a while getting more and more agitated. Driving around Melbourne like that reminds me of being about 20, and how inner-city Melbourne seemed like a magical playground where anything was possible. Now it all seems so hopelessly small-scale, but I know that most of that is just me being jaded and middle-aged, and it's that effect you get when you look down the wrong end of a telescope.

At one point this afternoon I took the kids on a slight detour from our usual route and we ended up parked outside a decrepit-looking house in Clayton North, just opposite Monash University. "Why are we here? What are you doing" etc... but it was the house I lived in when I was the age my oldest son is now. Back then it was a nice, smart big (double-block) house, but in the intervening 35 years it's been split up and rented out as student housing. The yard was all overgrown and in the middle of it was an old car that, judging by the undergrowth, hadn't been moved in years. "Is that your car from when you were a boy?" inquired my younger son, momentarily interested.

I probably didn't need to see all that today.

Playing with numbers..?

In the middle of an otherwise-boring article about parking in Bondi (and I know you'll have a view on this, TC) there's a little passage which really struck me.

The gist of it that shopkeepers at Bondi Beach had complained that parking meters at the beach suppressed foot traffic to their businesses, and hence, by implication, that if parking was free there'd be more customers. This doesn't sound implausible - fair enough.

But what the council did was to remove the parking meters to see if it had any effect on the number of people using the carpark. It turned out that when the meters weren't there, there were fewer people, and quite a significant number fewer.

Now, if you're the acting president of the Bondi and Districts Chamber of Commerce, and the owner of a shoeshop in the affected area you have two altervatives. You can either scratch you head and say "well, maybe the recent decrease in shopper numbers is due to some other factor not related to parking meters", or you can point out some methodological flaw with the experiment - I bet there's a lot of seasonality on parking numbers at Bondi, and weather-dependency (just to pluck two out of thin air) and even if there's not you should at last say that. As anyone who's ever watched "Yes, Minister" will know there are a number of very obvious ways to attack any study whose findings you don't like, and I would have thought that a non-properly-controlled trial that's run and monitored by a party with a vested interest should be a ludicrously easy target.

So exactly how did Max Siano, the shopkeeper in question, deal with this? He said:

"They can play with figures as much as they like. Meters and parking fines have been the major cause of the downturn of business at Bondi Beach." Clearly Mr Siano's not someone who's ever going to be swayed by mere evidence, or for that matter, someone who's capable of engaging in debate.

I know this is a long way from my usual stuff (food, sex, funny signs) but it really struck me. I probably need to get out more.

Ricecakes.

I'm living in my ex's house this week. She has a stash of ricecakes as lo-cal snacks. I've discovered they're great if you put quite a lot of butter on them. D'oh!

Blubber (not, it's not another one about my body... settle down!)

I'm in Melbourne all this week while my ex has gone to the US. I've moved into her house and am being Mr Mom to my 4 (yes, count 'em, 4!) kids. They're all quite different to each other, as kids are, and I bond with them in very different ways. Yesterday I had a sublime bonding moment with my number 2 son, one of those things that adds a bit of texture and oomph to our relationship.

My children, and especially the boys, know that I'm unhealthily obsessed with food. If I'm not eating or talking about food, I'm usually thinking about it. And I do notice that we use food, and especially stories about food and shared experiences around food to reinforce our sense of insiderness. I notice my older son (almost 11) will often bring up some food-related experience as way of bringing us together, and he often asks questions of me like "What's the worst meal you've ever had?", or , more interestingly, "What do you think is the worst meal we've ever had?" To which the answer is usually a dinner we had in Greece. The boys and I reminisce about meals we've shared, we re-live these experiences as a way of staying together. It does seem more important now too; I live in a different city, I don't see them all the time. It's these things that tie us together. So every so often we go over the sequence of events that led us to have the best ribs we've ever had, in a roadside place in Florida, or the meal we had once in an Indonesian restaurant in Melbourne where the was a knife fight in the kitchen.

Yesterday number two son (aged 9) and I decided to cook what we call "pig leg soup", which is agreeably fiddly and messy to make and has a couple of other interesting qualities. When cold, it's quite solid, so you can tip a container of it on its side and it just doesn't flow. Naturally, we do this each time as a test of consistency, sometimes with dramatic results if we haven't gotten it quite stodgy enough. It's very gassy, but that's also amusing.

Constructing pig leg soup has two phases. The first phase involves putting a big ham hock in a saucepan with lots of water and a few other things (thyme, an onion, a leek, a bay leaf and so on) and simmering for a hell of a long time. At the end of this phase, we take the ham hock out of the pot, let it cool just a bit, then the fun starts. Number 2 and I each get a knife and we attack the ham hock. We strip off the skin and the fat, or as he calls it, "the blubber", and we eat about half the meat ourselves, up to our elbows in pig fat, scoffing down chunks of too-hot meat and bits of fat. As we go we tear pieces of meat into little chunks and put it back into the soup. It's very messy and very primitive and atavistic. Number 2 even eats some chunks of pure blubber attached to pig skin, he seems to have a double-copy of the fat-loving gene that my mother's family carries. We stand in the kitchen shoulder-to-shoulder (well, shoulder to hip; he's only 9) and as we strip the flesh from the ham hock and wallow in the grease and fat I feel a profound sense of being in exactly the right place. The light changes color, time slows down. I can imagine doing this with number 2 in 20 years time when he's a grown man and has a job and a car.

Years ago when we were living in London and my ex (she wasn't an ex then) had gone to New York for a week, I cooked roast duck. The duck was agreeably fatty and when I pulled the roasting pan out of the oven there was a big pool of duck fat there. I used some of it to toss the beans and pasta in (I really cannot cook at all but once in a while i stumble across something that works) and then I still had quite a big quantity of hot duck fat. I called number 2 (then aged 6) into the kitchen. I showed him what to do. For the next few minutes we stood side by side, silently and very purposefully dipping slices of bread into the red-hot duck fat and scoffing it down, mouths burning. We talk about it still.

I had a fabulous sleep, including a dream where I actually stood up to my ex (who, just for the record, is a very reasonable person if handled correctly). In the dream I had had some chronic illness for which I needed specialised treatment (not unlike my Hep C, but also in some significant ways different. It was a dream, after all). As part of the treatment I had had to go to Geelong (go Cats). My ex was going through the documentation (receipts, medical reports) and something about it wasn't making sense to her. She started grilling me about it. Who did I stay with when I went to Geelong for treatment? My first thought was to lie, but I said 'with a friend'. She wasn't impressed but accepted it nonetheless.

Being found out is a very common theme in my dreams, and yes, I've discussed it with Peter at great length. Strangely enough, my friend A has exactly the same sort of dreams - even down to the two major sub-genres. More later.