waiting.
sweet mercy, the cool change is here.
yesterday’s 38° and today’s not-much-better was taking its sweaty, stinky toll. my feet were red and swollen like large warm steaks. it seemed like the best place to find lunch was in the freezer. it came so close to being ice cream, but ended up being a mound of peas and a lemon-crumbed fish fillet. this neccesitated both the oven and stovetop going full blast for a while at noon, but it was all worthwhile.
beneath the sombre pall that descended after the lavish turkish feast that was last night’s dinner…
[ lavish turkish feast interlude ]
it was the first birthday party of the boy’s sister’s kid, a smiley half australian-half turkish boy who grabs at my glasses whenever we meet. there was a kid’s party in the park with rolled-up jam and vegemite pinwheel sandwiches (not in the same pinwheel) and avocado and shredded carrot finger sandwiches, and pass-the-parcel with a jackson five live tape soundtrack, and bubbles, oh — and kids. so many kids. and then there was a grownup party back at the house with dolmades and olives, pide with a mean beetroot dip, four kinds of shish kebab: beef; chicken; veggie, with mushroom, green capsicum, asparagus and haloumi; and seafood, with scallops with the roe on, and green capsicum. and salads, including one with green beans and broad beans in yoghurt. and a great dome-shaped pavlova sandwiched with yoghurty cream and raspberries and rose syrup and covered in sugared rose petals. yes there was.
…we awoke this morning, confused. the words, “very depressed”, were put forth by a member of this household, in a tone of voice that could not have been flatter or sadder. but the confusion was because, despite the fact that everyone i know and most people in this country whose blogs i read appear to vote for not john howard (and also not any of those loopy christian / family values / otherwise insane parties), and despite the awful campaign ads and the shouting and pointing and jutting-out lower lip and overall less-niceness of the man, and um, the stuff that’s been done in the last few years… going to war, locking up children behind barbed wire, that sort of thing… it is john howard who’ll be putting on his tracksuit and power-morning-walking his victory lap for [undisclosed period of time] to come.
how can it be?
so i looked over at the still-unwrapped chocolate bar on my bookshelf, and along the spine of it, next to “extra creamy milk chocolate” in gold print, were the instructions “open here”.
ok, mr chocolate bar.
my bookshelf is now much closer to my desk — which explains why i managed to read the tiny type on the side of a chocolate bar despite near-legal blindness — since i moved it over from the opposite side of of the room, to make space for the crib and change table for the new person who will soon be upon us, holy fucken crap.
aside from moving furniture around, the mammoth magazine cull continues… the last couple of days i finally made it to my pile of “juice” magazines. if you read the previous post about cutting down the swathe of “spin”s and detected a faint poignancy about the exercise, this new challenge has been a few notches more melancholy. because these, i actually worked on.
i have issue one, and two, and three (you get the idea), from when i had to buy them at the newsagent… through to a couple from around issue ten when i did a spell of work experience there in third year uni, and then a bunch more, and then every issue from march 1995 when i was deputy art director for a couple of years, and then the year’s worth from november 1997 (issue 57) when i became art director, to october 1998, when i went postal and had to leave the company, and then a random few from after. yeah, i have a lot of issues.
now there’s a pile, facedown, at the top of the stairs, awaiting transfer to the recycling bin downstairs. it feels like i’m throwing out a chunk of australian publishing history, and every time i walk past i wonder if i’ve been too brutal. of course, i did keep all mine, and took clippings of choice layouts from the rest, where “choice” includes both the aesthetically pleasing and the “what the?” ludicrousness of that heady mid-nineties period of cutting edge magazine design. but aside from a very select few from the very early days (issue three, with evan dando in love beads and nothing else on the cover; issue eight: nirvana; issue 18: eddie vedder “on kurt’s death”), there they are, facedown, top of stairs.
sigh. there’s a feeling not so far back in my head that if my entire stash had not been so dotted with cockroach shit (just the outside covers, but still a misadventure in storage if there ever was one), i would have blogged instead about the extremely delicious watermelon i procured this week from the supermarket at a bargain 95c/kg.
what better way to start the week than plunder the magazine cupboard for another stack of old magazines to cast upon the steadily growing pile by the door. after a lengthy bout of procrastination, the cull finally began in earnest mid-last week.
started off with the “wallpaper”s and “the face”s, which were easier than i expected. and then a stack of those trendy, purposeless magazines out of LA or new york — easy. then the “esquire”s, which were a bit harder because there are actual articles in there that i found myself re-reading, including a trio of david sedaris stories, and a 1999 interview with osama bin ladin, and a bunch of randomness by ted from “queer eye”, like the one where he gets a fragrance made up especially for him, called “ted” . still, nothing i couldn’t add to the pile by the door.
this morning though, i have unearthed a couple boxes of ten year old “spin”s. the stacks of pulpy paper covered in grainy grungy photographs of kurt, the stories about river phoenix dying on the sidewalk, the introduction of alanis, the reviews of “pulp fiction” and “bakesale”. so now i’ve got “bakesale” on the CD player as i speedread courtney love’s lollapalooza diary and bloody hell it’s like a trip down memory lane.
a few days ago the boy was mocking “all those memories” but he has little idea of what’s tied up in these boxes of “spin”s. it’s all about the waking up in the middle of the night to pearl jam songs on the radio, the university work experience at a pop (culture) magazine, the design school major projects about rock music and junk food, the graduating and getting a job at the pop (culture) magazine, the shameless ripping off of other magazines for design tips… the design award, the gradual boredom and disillusionment with working on a magazine, the exiting the industry, the occasional yearning to be moving those slabs of words and pretty pictures around a page again…
oh happy day. because i only had $7 in my wallet yesterday, and wanted to get some DVDs and a chicken kebab for dinner, and didn’t want to walk all the way to the ATM in the dark, i ended up standing in line at the supermarket with a large paper bag of mushrooms (and two punnets of strawberries and a bar of chocolate), just so i could get some cash out at the register.
which meant that not only am i now halfway through “bowling for columbine”, which is much less hysterical and boorish than i thought it would be, and that flush with cash i was able to splash out on a bottle of turkish sour cherry juice to accompany my extremely succulent chicken kebab, but also that when i woke up this morning, there was a large bag of mushrooms in the fridge ready to be fried up into my favourite breakfast of all: mushrooms on toast. mmm…
hem. yesterday, after years of gazing up at the maple syrup shelf in the supermarket, i finally decided to spend $6.99 on 250ml of real canadian maple syrup rather than $3.99 on half a litre of made in australia maple-flavoured syrup. and the thing is, i think i might prefer the cheap stuff; it tastes more mapley.
o.0
still, the french toast and boysenberry yoghurt didn’t seem to mind being drenched in it this morning.
—
yoghurt-buying conversation, sunday
me: mmm… that passionfruit yoghurt is so pretty [indeed it had a golden swirl throughout, and was studded with beady black seeds], but the boysenberry looks tasty [i like the look of a thick layer of pulpilicious purple berry pooled at the bottom of the container].
boy: get the boysenberry. it’s always a tasty berry.
me: i don’t think there are any berries that are not good and tasty.
boy: well. there’s poisonberry.
