After watching one of those videos where someone takes a picture of themselves every day for a year I dicked around with my wee Lumix for a bit, trying to figure out how exactly someone could take a picture of themselves every day and keep the framing and focus and lighting exactly the same. Later that night I went to a party, the Lumix got handed around, and people found countless pictures of my puffy, Truman-Capote-on-a-hot-day face. It wasn’t great.
You know what’s better than faces? Trees. Trees don’t get embarrassed.
I don’t really care too much about ‘the music,’ but lately I can’t stop listening to At Hultsfred 98 by Jens Lekman, because that song is the sound of the last couple of weeks.
I came back to Melbourne from Canberra at 6am on Boxing Day, and as soon as I dragged myself into the office four hours after landing I knew it was a mistake. Canberra isn’t exactly a fun town, but my micro-family of mother and sister and their pets is there, and so are many friends I never get to see, but I had this idea that I should come home and work on my thesis. I shouldn’t have come home. My boyfriend of two years left in November, and with him went my concentration, and I’d have been better off in Canberra, puttering around in the rented car I’d named Marshmallow, watching Foxtel, loitering in friends’ living rooms and kitchens, walking my mother’s dachshunds and thinking of new nicknames for them.
My office building is wonderfully empty, though, and silent, almost post-apocalyptic. I can listen to whatever embarrassing music I like at whatever volume I like, and scuttle from photocopier room to photocopier room looking for paper. There’s no one around to see me punch the air when I finish my daily quota of words to be written, and no one to notice that most of those words were quotes ctrl+c’d out of Endnote, and I can have my crying spells with the door open.
I will be glad, though, when everyone’s done having a holiday and there are people around again.
Canberra op shops are the best op shops in the whole country, and while I’ve never been to Queensland or the Northern Territory or Tasmania I feel safe in that assertion. When I went back home recently for a friend’s wedding I had a feeling in my waters that the op shops would be heaving with ripe bounty that day, so my mother and I went to do my usual circuit of the best Belconnen stores.
Mum found this perfect blazer tucked away somewhere, and I love it more than anything. I’d been after a slightly oversized black blazer for a while after reading Childhood Flames and deciding that 2009 would be the year of all black, all the time, but this blazer made me change my mind. It’s a little bit Annie Hall, a little bit Seinfeld, there is green stitching and pleats around the inside pocket, and it fits perfectly. Canberra FTW!
Mum would say ‘don’t prop’ whenever we were out in public and dawdling, or daydreaming, or loitering, or any of the things my sister and I liked to do. She did this as long as I can remember and never understood what she meant by ‘don’t prop,’ but got the feeling I should know and didn’t bother to ask. When I was in Canberra for Christmas I offered to take her dogs out for a walk, and she became fretful and explained that Monty, a sweet-faced dachsund with the dimensions of a manatee, would often prop while out on walks, and twist out of his martingale collar.
‘Why don’t you just say stop, mum?’ I asked, after 25 years of wondering. ‘Why is it always ‘prop’? It would be just as easy to say ’stop.’ You just swap out one vowel sound.’
‘Well, you know, it’s like in the rugby.’
‘The what? That sport we’ve never watched or paid attention to ever in our lives?’
At first I thought it was just a Victorian phenomenon, given the Vic government’s penchant for shrill road signs exhorting drivers to ‘Slow Down!’ and ‘Sleep Now!’ and ‘Stop Taking So Much Meth!’ and ‘You Will Kill Everyone You Love With Your Reckless, Sloppy Drunk Driving!’
First, there’s the startling, Romero-style WorkSafe PSAs.
Then there’s that Quitline PSA, where they genuinely traumatise a real, small child.
But none of these have anything on the Queensland Government’s rapey, desperately sexist anti-Vodka Cruiser PSA.
I have no real critique of these things, other than to say what the fuck, Australia? Is this really the way to stop your citizens from wearing short skirts and incorrectly using bread slicers and looking into nail guns with a shiteating grin and abandoning children in train stations because you didn’t quit smoking and then you died from lung cancer and that’s how devastated your child is?
Then again, none of these stomach-turningly graphic PSAs have anything on this New Zealand ad. Late this year I was briefly in Auckland, staying in a sterile hotel and connecting with the alienated businessman part of myself, and I was already feeling pretty low when I happened across:
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