Holiday hangover

I'm in a funk. Not just because I'm not on holidays somewhere far away, or even on holidays in my home town; it might also be because my boyfriend's not on holidays either. Something I discovered between my passport going missing, getting lost in the giant shopping mall of Singapore, and spilling my guts - almost literally - in Delhi: that damn, I really love spending time with this man. Actually, I love him. To bits.

Of course, I knew that already and I say it all the time - as in "love you, have a good day!" or "love you, gotta run - bye!", even "love you, thanks!" (...for cooking dinner/ picking me up/ doing something lovely). But I must admit there's some disconnect between those few words and full conscious awareness of what they mean. Not that I've ever stopped loving him since I started, it's just good to be reminded that you do. A moment to stop taking things for granted - without having to ever put your life, dignity or future at risk.

Now we're both back to the grind, I'm taking note of the way everyday life gets in the way of the good stuff. And I'm not happy about it.

The first week Kiko was back in the office was probably the worst from him. He said he'd completely lost his stress tolerance. Six weeks beforehand he wouldn't have noticed the pressures he was under, but after so long free of that burden he was un-prepared to take it all on again.

I felt stressed finding him so stressed. When you're in the thick of it, you don't notice the way these things shape you, but even the look on his face, his posture, the tone in his voice - it all changed in a few short days. He looked worried, restless, weighed down by an invisible something. He wasn't available to me anymore. The easiness of holidays was gone too easily, too soon.

And it's happening to me too. One week back on the wards, and my mind is already distracted by things I could and should be doing. I'm planning my time, portioning my life into little bits of things that need doing. There's not the time for deep and meaningfuls or strange flights of ideas. We've shifted gear. We're purposeful, practical, efficient.

I feel the pang of anxiety. On holiday, I realised something so precious. I realised it and got to bask in its warmth for six whole weeks. And now everyday life is forcing me to loosen my grip. My instinct is to squeeze tighter. Hold on. Don't let go.

But it's hard to re-create that precious closeness in the midst of the working week. You get home long after you left. You're tired and your mind is full of things that filled the day, what's waiting for you tomorrow. And dinner needs to be cooked, and the house is looking a bit shabby, and stuff needs to be done. But you take a moment and ask 'how was your day? What did you do?' But you already know that the answer is pretty much 'Okay' and 'Stuff... meetings, a project I'm working on' - nothing that means anything, because the person you're asking, their mind is working just like yours. It needs time to unwind. The questions you ask don't deserve the answers you want.

So that's the funk I'm in. I miss my boyfriend. Who I live with. And see everyday. Oh, and I wish I was on holiday. Forever. With him.

Is that too much to ask?

Booting

I want boots, but I can't have them. I could have them, but I can't wear them; these giant calves of mine get in the way.

So I thought I'd ask DrGoogle: what can I do about these ginormous calves of mine? And the advice I found (from numerous sources) included the following:

- Don't do squats;
- Don't do calf-raises;
- Don't run up hills;
- Don't jump;
- Don't skip;
- Don't walk up stairs;
- Don't walk down stairs;
- Avoiding walking on your toes;
- Minimise exercise involving your legs.

Right. What I take from this is: sit on the couch, preferably with your legs bound to splints. Don't move, except maybe to go to the toilet by dragging your body along the floor with your arms.

What they're saying is let the muscles of your calves waste away through disuse and you can expect to have slimmer calves.

Nice work, Dr Google.

I guess you can apply the same principle to weight-loss in general. Don't do anything, by which I mean DO NOTHING! And you're sure to lose weight as your muscle mass wastes away! Hooray. It's THAT easy.

I'd rather be without boots than have beautiful, useless legs. I'm going to reject any advice that deters me from exercise. So since I got no joy from the world wide web, I thought of a more sensible plan for getting into a pair of boots:

Lose weight. Not by sitting on the couch dammit! But through sensible eating and regular, challenging exercise over a long period of time. There's no quick fixes.

I'm also going to work in some more stretching into my routine. I'm not sure it will have a great impact on my muscle bulk, but it feels good and it's something I currently neglect.

I did also search online to find out what the average calf circumference is for a fashionable pair of boots is. For a size 7-8 (AUS), you're looking at 35-36cm. I have babies with a 42cm circumference (bloody huge). That's a 6cm difference. And if I'm going to by myself some birthday boots in April, I'm aiming to loose 6cm in just over 2 months? Let's be realistic, I don't think that can happen. That's 1/7 the size of my calf, and that sort of reduction in size doesn't happen quickly or easily.

So I guess, getting into boots will happen in time. Maybe a longer time than I'd like, but that's okay. I lost fitness and put on weight last year when I struggled to adjust to my new routine and the beautiful food my live in lover likes to serve me. But I've made changes and have been learning new habits since late last year, and little by little I'm getting there.

The boots are going to have to wait.

Reading into India

I knew that India gained Independence from British Colonial rule on the stroke of midnight, 26 January 1947, because I’d read so in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Perhaps too much of my knowledge of world history and politics has been influenced by the adventures of fictional characters in the novels I’ve read, but then - maybe they’re still a more reliable source than some others?

I thought I knew more about India than what influenced by the magically real and convoluted family sagas I’ve read about in Indian (Enlglish language) literature. What Vikram Seth or Arundhati Roy hadn’t taught me, I’d learnt from the people I’ve met, know, admire and fallen in love who hail from India. But even then, I lacked context. My impressions were influenced by the beautiful words and mystical metaphors my story tellers used. That they told stories of violence and suffering became more romantic tragedy than offensive.

My boyfriend’s mother lends the stories of her childhood something fantastic. She’s an artist, and she can’t help but give her autobiography beauty. The most difficult stories are touched by nostalgia, and the rough edges of life smoothed over. I love listening to her convoluted tales of her family and the journeys they followed before arriving in Australia - but what I’m left with is something so extravagant it almost seems unreal. That they left everything to board a ship to Africa, with no passports, no papers- not even citizenship: homeless, nationless, nobody - is an invitation to read between the lines.

And then you talk to your friends who’ve just returned from India. They’re born again vegetarians, they’ve taken up yoga, read Shantaram and had a close encounter of the spiritual kind. That, or they’re suffering some chronic diarrhoeal illness and never want to speak of the place again.

Anyway, my point is: from where I sit, India is a romantic place. If it’s not the seat of some supposed spiritual authenticity, it’s is a land of grand epics of tragedy, love, loss and glory. But then you arrive, and India is nothing like that at all. I won’t pretend to know or understand too much of the place in my short time there, but even in the brief time, the small glimpse I had - it’s impossible to reconcile much of the India inside my head with what I saw.

I started reading William Darymple’s Nine Lives on the beech somewhere in Vietnam. And in many ways it’s a book that confirms all my most romantic imaginings of India. Years before I read City of Djinns and The Age of Kali by the same author, and in case you didn’t know Mr Darymple is a beautiful writer. He’s a historian and I believe has a religious program on BBC, and his portraits of the history and complexities of the city (Delhi in the former, Mumbai in the latter) are so vivid and rich. In Nine Lives he presents nine vignettes of religious life in India, exploring religious practice of some fantastic and bold characters.

He’s side-stepped the big kids on the block. There’s no direct exploration of the influence of mainstream Hinduism, Islaam, Buddhism or Christianity - but instead focuses on the individual’s experience of their more local religious practice.

Darymple found his subjects in the village. He meets a man who stands at the end of a long line of orators whose livelihood involves wandering from town to town reciting the long Hindu epics interpreted for the audience of village farmers and itinerant workers that he visits. The poems he recites are so long and detailed, he performs them over a week, performing his audience from dusk till dawn, singing and dancing before the open fire in the village square.

Before that, he followed a Jain nun on her pilgrimage and learnt more of her religion and the path to her devotion. Jain nun pursue a life dedicated to relinquishing everything that is worldly. All relationships, all love, all ‘attachments’ to this tangible, chaotic world. In pursuit of this aim, they must constantly wander, lest they find themselves attached to a place. The Jain nuns exist on a meagre, ‘pure’ diet that excludes not only all animal product but any vegetable that dies in the process of being harvested. No onions, no root vegetables, no garlic.

Her strict asceticism and discipline is undone by her broken heart. She never says as much, but she fell love with a fellow nun, who many years beforehand died of TB. In spite of her incredible acts of self-denial, her grief speaks volumes of her deep attachment. The story haunted me.

Whether by accident or design the focus on Indian village life underlines this as the place of spiritual integrity and authenticity. A nostalgic image of a world defending itself against the corruptions of modernity and progress. When you read between the lines, poverty and deprivations are signs that this is the real deal.

Darymple warns us of the tensions that underlie the imaginings of romantic India as he shines the light on the cost of preserving tradition. Darymple notes that linguists have found a pre-requisite for the epic poetry performers to be able to recite their long sagas - that if written down might fill several volumes of books, a thousand pages each - is illiteracy. Other nations that shared a similar oral tradition have lost that practice when their great orators learnt to read.

Another chapter tells the tale of a woman who was devoted to the goddess Yellama as a young girl. Her dedication to the goddess involves working as a prostitute - a holy prostitute. Under the guise of this cult, her profession is given some legitimacy and esteem that it might not otherwise.

You can trace back this cult to the great Hindu temples of centuries ago, where these women held positions of power and influence in a courtly society. But it’s a different story now - where it seems, under the auspices of the Goddess, very young girls are forced into sex slavery to support their families. The woman Darymple meets, now in her forties, has been a hostage of the goddess since her menarche. Her family’s poverty forced them to sell their daughters virginity as soon as she reached puberty, and it breaks your heart as you read to learn she did the same to her own daughters - all who have now died from the complications of HIV.

I never got even a glimpse of the lives or religions that I read about in this book, but it did give me a keen interest in the strange dynamics of religion in this country. I’ve been reading more about Indian politics and economics - because I’ve been on holiday and I could, so I’ll hope you’ll indulge me while I write more about this country.

William Darymple. ‘Nine Lives: In search of the sacred in modern India’. Bloomsbury, London. 2010.

Traffic

One of my pet hates about Perth is the traffic infrastructure and how that shapes driver behaviour (=frustration and rage). There's nothing tricky about driving in Perth. In fact, all decisions are taken out of your hands so Perth drivers never need to Think-and-Drive. In fact, just this week the WA minister for transport announced they're trialling traffic lights on freeway on-roads to improve merging.

What?

Just in case you're not from round here, Perth drivers don't know how to merge. So how will traffic lights help there cause? The light does green and - guess what - they still don't know how to merge. Ppfff. Stupid.

So last night I met the man responsible. Or a man in some way responsible. He was a civil engineer. A civil engineer who works on stuff to do with Perth roads. Traffic lights even.

I don't think this guy has ever received such an excited response at a dinner party after he's confessed that yes, he's a civil engineer (yawn!) But excited I was. He was the man I'd been looking for all this time. It was fate we were brought together.

And this should've been my moment. I deliver an impassioned speech about the frustrations and stupidity of Perth roads. And I am so persuasive, he immediately realises the error of his ways. As of now, the traffic light sequences will be changed to optimise driver happiness and the efficient movement of traffic. All would be right with this city.

But instead, Kiko started off on a tangent on how cool the traffic was in Saigon and how it was like a school of fish. And then I might have sounded like a crackpot when I told him the average waiting time at key Perth interesections and my secret plan to film empty interestions and prolonged red lights...and, well, it might have been clear to the man from the outset that Perth Traffic is a theme of impassioned, but maybe not always reasoned conversation in our household.

And he says: I guess we're all experts, aren't we? I'll go google a few medical conditions just now and get back to the doctor over there and I'll tell them what's wrong with me, shall I?

Ouch!

After that, our enthusiasm for this topic kind of petered out and we changed topics. We backed down basically. So close, but we lost our nerve when the target was in sight. We discussed him on the way home in the taxi. The one that got away.

Voyeur

I confess: last night I fb-stalked a girl I went to school with. Somewhere in those lost middle years of high school we had the kind of intense friendship only 14 year old girls can, that perhaps could only end with great difficulty. By the end of year ten both of us had changed schools. She got a scholarship to an expensive private school. I was running away from my problems. And I've never spoken to her since.

You'd think I would have stalked her already. Who doesn't search out long lost friends? But this was different. And I hadn't - I don't even know what made me look her up last night. But there she was. With an open, un-locked page and all. Fifteen years older, and so different from the girl I knew.

Back then, she was defiantly different. And not in a cool way. She was intelligent and articulate and outspoken. She seemed impervious to the snide remarks and mocking of her classmates. Teachers loved her. Her peers were unnerved by her. And I was both in awe and slightly embarrassed of her.

What happened between us is something I can't explain. Or won't explain. Fifteen years on it seems too difficult and complicated and confusing to try to pick apart the angst and fear and vulnerabilities of my adolescence. But what did happen was the beginning of some turbulent times. I still feel a mix of shame and grief when I think back to then and wonder (or worry) how much of all that still shapes the person I am today?

But anyway. I looked her up. And she's a stranger, with the same brown eyes and curled lips that I knew. She's successful, like I knew she'd be. But I'd never guess how.

She's successful enough that when I google her, I can find her name in newspaper articles and videos. I'd never guess she'd be a fashion designer, a business woman. She lives overseas. She travels all around the world. Every month, somewhere different. Her hair is glossy, perfect. Her clothes conservative, maybe a little boring, expensive. Her husband is handsome. Polished and poised.

What am I doing?

I'm curious. But not enough to want to contact her. I don't kid myself we could ever be friends or even acquaintances. I'm curious in a way that's about picking at an old scab. Scratching at my insecurities. Seeing everything I'm not in what she seems to be. I don't measure up.

I only learnt to properly straighten my hair last year. My wardrobe is full of tired clothes I bought five years ago. She is quoted in an article talking about her $1300 Valentino heals. I put on five kilos last year. She has legs to die for. I got a call from the bank yesterday about my credit card. She leads a life far beyond my reach.

Why am I comparing myself to this stranger? Feeling so inadequate and incompetent? Even if I weren't a student, I could never be what she's become. So desperate to get out of the public service, International Business Woman wasn't an option I turned down for medicine.

Why am I doing this?

In article she talks about 'taxi-to-bar' heels. On her fb wall she's at the theatre, reading something profound, drinking something reserved, eating somewhere famous. I bet her conversations are witty, peppered with tales of adventure in far flung places. I bet she's funny and sophisticated.

And everything I'm not.

What am I doing? I'm fifteen years old again.

Goddamn! Snap out of it!

On your marks, get set...

Blogging is like exercising. You enjoy it when you're in the groove, but if you slack off - there's nothing harder than coming back to it. And actually, as the reader, there's nothing more boring than the apologetic 'sorry I haven't written for so long' post following the posting drought. So I'll stop this paragraph now and just get on with it.

I'm back from a holiday. A proper holiday! And my passport has a whole new set of stamps to prove it. So now I'm all refreshed, recharged and excited about the year ahead, you can look forward to some more postings coming this way.

If anyone's still out there, I hope you'll enjoy reading...

Saigon sling

I could be anywhere in the world in this new apartment, tastefully decorated, daily cleaned. But I am in Saigon. Which means I obviously got hold of our passports in time to get on the plane. And in between now and then I've fallen in love with Hong Kong in quick time then landed here.

We're passing time in my uncle's apartment. Taking daily excursions into the chaos and commotion of district one, before returning home to the relative calm of this well-to-district. I thought we'd just be passing through, but we've paused longer. My auntie, his wife, died not long ago. And here in this apartment, I've met a man I didn't know before.

His soft voice and slow, purposeful movements only underscore her absence. She wouldn't be living in a place like this. She would have found somewhere in the thick of things, maybe not so nice or clean, but somewhere that told you where you were, reminded you of the smells and flavour of the city - its pace and organised disorder. She'd want it that way for the experience, to learn about the place - for the stories.

She was opinionated and stubborn. Conversations always leaned toward debates, as is my family tradition. Debate became argument, became eloquent, forceful speeches, long monologues and treatise handed down before dessert. She followed family traditions faithfully.

And she was always colourfully dressed, maybe almost over-dressed. Her outfits were always elaborate, not always appropriate. She wore furs in Kuala Lumpur and delicate heals aboard a two-man dinghy. Antique jewels weighed down her wrists and heavy gems decorated her fingers. She had charm bracelets and heavy chains of yellow gold that sang along as her arguments reached their crescendo.

So the quiet, the muted shades, the understated decor, the cleaning lady and the bare fridge tell me she's not here. The clean white walls and polished tiles and beige furnishings. The door staff that will call you taxis and hand you the paper. The rooftop pool. The sterile suburb. The lonely streets. The restaurants filled with ex-pats serving everything but local cuisine.

She's not here.

So we've lingered a little longer. To fill the apartment with noise and conversation. Line the pantry with at least the basics, and to cook home cooked meals. I asked my uncle were we making too much noise. I didn't know if our bustling in the kitchen was welcome. And he reassured me. He missed the noise. The sound of pots and pans and dishes. Of our conversation. Of laughing. Make noise. Bang doors. Turn the TV louder.