Television Addict

Last Saturday night a friend invited me to a party. Not just a party, a warehouse party. With cocktails. In Collingwood. I politely declined. It had been a long week and I was tired. No big deal I hear you say. But, as recently as 12 months ago, such an invite would have been like cat nip to me. A Collingwood warehouse party (for all its pretentious associations) would mean a night of wild dancing to 'ironic' '80s or '90s dance music coupled with a drunken flirtation with at least one bearded bass player. So why did I opt out? Is it because I'm getting old? Is it because my new job is stressful and making me sleepy all the time? Certainly those things are contributing factors. But the real reason is much more shameful. The reason I didn't join my friend was because the American TV ratings season is in full swing, and I'm hooked. 

I have always loved television. Get Smart still makes me swoon and The Goodies brings back memories of quality family time spent at the dinner table eating our steaks and watching the box. The most insidious thing about my modern day addiction however is the ease of access to all this brain junk. There are websites that allow me to stream all of this television crack for free, and in real time! 

 Is it not a little unhygenic to speak into a shoe?

The other thing about modern television is it's actually really good. Sometimes when a series ends, it feels like breaking up with somebody you've grown to care about. Books have this affect on me too. But sadly, the escape I used to seek through books has largely been replaced through the ease and...urm...watchablity of TV. 

It's not that regular life is so horrible that I feel the need to escape into a fantasy world, but really, who wants to think about bearded bass players when Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes is fighting zombies in post-apocalyptic America in The Walking Dead? Who wants to worry about deadlines and Board meetings when there's explicit medieval erotica to view in Game of Thrones?


Naturally it's not all legitimised soft porn and meaningless violence that I'm attracted to. There are stories and characters that I feel are written for me and about me. The character of Hannah in Girls makes me squirm with the memory of being 24 years old, self-obsessed and insecure. 

Equally, the episodes of Mad Men when Don and Peggy are so beautifully in sync with each other makes me think of the incredible friendships that can exist between men and women when there's no sex to complicate things. 

Peggy is not the hot one

Of course the downside to this addiction is the inevitable withdrawal - for ratings season will soon come to a close. Then what? Now that my secret is out, I may never be asked to another party again. Maybe if I revisit The Sopranos from season one I can shore up my Saturday nights for the next 9 years.
 
 

Breed why don't you

Yesterday I celebrated my 35th birthday. Apparently I am now at an eligible age to run for the United States presidency. I am also apparently at the age where people find it appropriate to ask me if I want children. Tick tock goes the biological clock.

I visited my parents last week and we discussed my cousin's new baby. My aunt described my cousin as 'an older mum'. She's 37. In my world, anybody giving birth under the age of 30 bears a social stigma not unlike a teen pregnancy - a sorry state to be patronizingly pitied. I realise of course that 'my world' encompasses a two kilometer radius around my house and is not necessarily reflective of the greater population. In fact, according to Google (is there anything you can't do), the average age for women to have their first baby is 29. Indeed, my own mum had three kids by my age - and still managed to look better in a bikini than I ever will.

How did she manage that hair style with three kids?

Now here's the controversy. I don't want kids right now. The problem with this however, is that 'right now' will not always be 'right now'. There is the risk I'll wake up at 44, having done all I want to do as a single, professional woman, and think 'geez, a kid would have been nice'. But, by this time of course, the biological clock says no.

I had a hilarious conversation with my dad a couple of months ago when I declared that kids were not in my plan. Rather than try and talk me out of it, dad responded with something like 'well darl, if your mother and I had our time again, we likely wouldn't have had any either'. Mum was shouting in the background 'but we love you kids'. According to dad, kids are 'too much bloody worry'. I can understand this. I never really took to dogs for this reason. Too much responsibility - what, with their sad 'please walk me' eyes and their unconditional love. No thank you.

I'm a godmother to one of my dearest friends' first born. I'm mad about that kid - though she's still too young to really know who I am. She tried to push me off the slide the other day and it hurt my feelings a little. I don't care to imagine the pain of being a mum to a teenage girl who declares 'I hate you. I'll do what I want. I'm 15 now!' (Sorry mum, it was a tough time for us both). This is the joy of being a godmother. She'll go through a period of hating her mum, as all teenagers do, but, I get to play impartial observer. The sage giver of advice. The 'maiden aunt' with humourous tales of a life lived large. At the very least I'll help her buy her first bottle of vodka when she's underage.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. I'm 35 now. And I don't want kids. Stop asking me.

The Golden Plains

The Golden Plains music festival has, over the last five years, become a mainstay event in my social calendar. For three days over the labour day long weekend, me, along with the entire population of Melbourne's inner north, pack up our gourmet cheese platters, decant Bombay Sapphire gin into plastic bottles and travel out beyond Geelong for camping, music, dancing and overindulgence.


Sadly, three days of live music and wheels of French brie don't come cheap. Additionally, I hate camping. I hate it. I hate the dirt, the sleeping mats that make your hips hurt and the inevitable distance to the toilet. So, last year, I vowed that I'd reconsider my priorities before committing to Golden Plains 2012. Unfortunately for my bank balance (and hygiene standards), when the call for 2012 went around, I was in Berlin, on the other side of the world and missing my dear urban family. I hastily agreed, dispatched the cash and waited for the fun to begin.

It was at least two weeks prior to the event that the organisational email chain began. 'Who's going?', 'who needs a tent?', 'what booze are you bringing?', 'camembert or feta?'. The excitement only builds upon arrival. Despite my dislike for camping, I do get a strange satisfaction in being able to put up a tent. So, after standing back and admiring the perfectly erected tent city, the Golden Plains Team assembled in the shared marquee for the first round of beers and music planning. The house mate's boyfriend had clearly done this type of thing before. This was evident in the laminated playlist taped to the marquee wall and the professional lighting system arranged for back at camp relaxation. This was going to be fun, right?


The thing about this sort of event is the expectation that you're going to have the time of your life. You spend months planning, plotting and feeling sorry for anybody who chooses not to, or can't afford to go. This is one of the reasons that before the sun had a chance to go down, I was already a six pack of beer into my night. And still I hadn't made it to the stage to hear any music. Eventually I headed to the amphitheater to see Wild Flag, which, combined with my cloak of boozed happiness, made me smile and long for the days when I too could have been a guitar playing rock chick, throwing out karate kicks on stage. By the time the Kiss cover band came on at 11pm, I'd ingested so much artificial confidence that I was convinced if this wasn't the time of my life, it was at least as much fun as I'd had since the last Golden Plains. By 3am, however, when I was quietly retching over the composting toilets, 'fun' was not in my vocabulary. By 10am 'abysmal' was all I could muster.

What followed the next day was conducted in complete sobriety. For the first time in five years I got a glimpse of the amazing landscape surrounding the site. I sat back at camp with friends and laughed so hard I could hardly breathe. I waited 45 minutes for a 3 minute shower which was an utterly sensational feeling after a day and night of filth. I even listened to some music with focus and a critical ear (First Aid Kit were boring, Roots Manuva was a hip hop delight and Urge Overkill made me want to never take drugs again).

Any excuse to show this clip

 
Towards the end of the weekend, my friend R asked 'what age do you think you are when you stop coming to Golden Plains?' At the time I answered that it was more likely you stop coming when you have other priorities like kids to look out for. But, what I should have said was, you stop coming when you realise you don't need three days of booze fueled enforced fun to really enjoy the company of friends, music and nature. 

Loving letters

When lacking ideas for new blog posts, I try to revisit my first ever post, which outlines some of the resolutions I vowed to fulfil this year. I thought I might tackle the resolution to write somebody who lives far away a long letter or a short postcard.
 
It got me thinking about the last letter I had received or indeed written (not counting the letter to my enemy, from a post back in January). The last letter I wrote was to a friend in Germany. I decided I'd write her a letter as I had long ago promised to send her a book I was reading while I was in Berlin. What was interesting was how unnatural it felt to pen an old fashioned letter. I didn't even pen it. I typed it. And, I should also add, it was a boring letter. It had none of the immediacy, and therefore none of the wit of an email. Emails I can do. Emails I'm damn good at.

I was in a relationship about five years ago which was enacted almost entirely over email. We met through a mutual friend, and, being a couple of years younger than me, this lad thought it appropriate to conduct a courtship over email. Then followed a six month romance spanning close to ten emails a day. We were funny, sometimes banal, often entertaining and always flirtatious. We were good over email. What we weren’t so good with was real life. We broke up on a Friday night over some uncomfortable beers in a dire city pub. And I was fine with it, really I was. It was only on Monday when faced with my empty mailbox, did I sob like a child. I missed those emails more than I missed my boyfriend. About a month later, I decided to print out all the emails we'd sent each other and give them to him as a dossier of our romance. It sounds kind of creepy on reflection, but, re-reading that correspondence helped me get over my moderate heartache and revel in some of our cleverer one liners.
 
The email romance was really as close as I have come to writing or receiving love letters in the traditional sense. However, since I am an unashamed sucker for anything sentimental, I did keep most of the correspondence from my first relationship. My first relationship didn't happen until I was 19. By age 21, we were living together. In the bloom of first love, and with the thrill of play acting as adults, we used to write little notes to each other - mostly with domestic instruction, but always led with, or followed by, an endearment.

'I'll get the milk. Love K'.

'Babe, at Dan's place. Love L'.

This was before text messaging made everything so damn easy. And so clinical. Whilst I'm thankful that 'babe' is no longer an acceptable term of affection, it's depressing to think I don't know what my last two boyfriends' handwriting looks like. Whereas, L's handwriting is unmistakeably imprinted in my mind.

My first boyfriend was married recently. I sent him an email to say congratulations. Now, though he doesn't actually live that far away (Sydney), I think I'll write him a short postcard to wish him a happy marriage. Maybe he remembers my handwriting too. Hopefully he's long forgotten that we used to call each other 'babe'.

A misspent youth

My memory is terrible. It is also totally unpredictable in its terribleness. I have no problem remembering that bin night is Tuesday or that I have a haircut booked for Saturday, but, there are sections of my childhood that hardly exist in my memory. To be exact, I don't remember much about my life from birth until around age eleven. It is not as though I had some unspeakable childhood trauma which rendered me memory-less. More likely my childhood was so comfortable and incident free that the few memories I do have are falsely formulated from various 1980s episodes of 'Home and Away'. The photos on my parents' walls certainly suggest I was a bookish though cheerful and carefree kid who enjoyed putting on theatrical productions with my cousins and enthusiastically attending any event which served cake and red cordial. I was extremely happy to pander to this false memory until, last week, when a cold hard reality package landed at my front door.

My parents are moving house and mum has taken the move as an opportunity to exhume the many boxes of my belongings that have been gathering mold in their shed for the past ten years. Many items from my life have been sold off at garage sale - from cabbage patch kids to the entire Sweet Valley High back catalogue, and a once used crepe maker. However, a stash of my school report cards failed to find a willing buyer so, along with handfuls of old photos, they were packaged up and posted to my Melbourne home.

You may imagine my delight at seeing such an exciting time capsule on my doorstep. Here I would be able to show friends pictures of my 'Home and Away' childhood, my straight As and gushing teacher comments. Indeed, the first report I opened from class 3B (dated 5 June 1984) confirmed all my hopes:
'Kristen is a very quiet and conscientious worker, who sets an example for others to follow. She is a pleasure to have in the classroom'.
I was also happy to receive As for 'Interest in literature', 'spelling', 'computation skills' and 'social studies knowledge'. Excellent. Next up, class 4C:

'Kristen is sometimes rather negative and needs encouraging'. Oh dear. My single A that year was relegated to 'Interest in literature'. The rest of the report contained many average Cs and a couple of half-hearted Bs.

By class 6C it seemed I was one step away from juvenile detention:
'Kristen needs to take a more serious approach to her work. She seems to resent authority and could achieve better results with a little more dedication'. The scarce As were restricted to the 'writing' section and my first D was slotted (unsurprisingly) within the 'mathematics' section. 'Physical education' received a 'lacks interest', with a capital 'N' indicating the 'need for improvement'.


What a misapprehension! My entire childhood (as I understood it) was a lie! Surely I was just misunderstood? Perhaps the photos would debunk these (undoubtedly) false claims?

Okay, apparently not. My big brother is looking rather self-satisfied however so I would like to blame my sour expression not on bad temperament, but on a very likely dead arm (which would have been administered by my brother just prior to this photo being taken).

I'm not sure what lesson I've gathered from this trip down my memory's dark lane ways, other than to be a little more discerning about the lies my brain tends to retain. I know this can be said for many things beyond my childhood - the tendency to romanticise past relationships is a prime example. But, if I were to debunk those romantic notions I'd need to uncover the tragic diaries of my youth. And rather than go through that agony, perhaps it's best to live that lie a little longer. With any luck they've already been purchased at mum and dad's latest garage sale.

Pretty in Pink - the story continues

I am a sentimental fool. There is really no other way to explain why, when preparing for a night of babysitting, I bypassed the Foreign Language and Art House sections of my local Video Focus and headed determinedly for Classics. There, inexplicably amongst Casablanca and Citizen Kane, was the 'classic' 1986 film, Pretty in Pink. I first watched this film when I was about 10 years old. I recall praying to Santa Claus (don't ask), that one day I would grow up to be exactly like Andie (Molly Ringwald) from Pretty in Pink. Twenty four years on, I think Andie would benefit from a punch in her pouty face.

Let me try to explain my strong reaction by outlining the plot of this 'classic' tale of teenage love from the wrong side of the tracks. Andie (Ringwald) is poor. She doesn't like being poor so she pouts a lot. She makes her own clothes out of tapestries and tablecloths. She has a penchant for pearl necklaces (double entendre alert)! Andie's best friend Duckie loves her. Duckie is sweet, funny and impeccably dressed.

'I'm poor.' 'I love new wave'.

Andie doesn't love Duckie because she loves Blane (Andrew McCarthy). Blane is rich which is why he wasn't stoned to death in the schoolyard for having the most ridiculous name ever. Blane thinks Andie 'has something' so takes a punt and asks her to prom.

'You'll be wearing that necklace to prom right?'

Because Blane is rich, his parents and friends are judgmental. Steff (James Spader) judges the most.

 'I'm rich and I throw parties.'

Because of his judgmental friends, Blane isn't sure he still wants to take Andie to the prom. When Andie hears of this she proceeds to lose her shit in the school corridor and explodes spectacularly into a cloud of pink bile. Despite this, she isn't going to 'let them beat her', and decides to go to prom anyway. She decides to dress as a box of strawberry fruitloops.

 'I made this myself. Can you tell?'

Even though Duckie's heart has been crushed between Andie's cold, pale fingers, he goes to prom alone, in the hope that Andie will be there. Duckie tells Andie that she looks amazing. He is clearly a man blinded by love because, in actuality, Andie is dressed as a box of sugary cereal. This is because Duckie is awesome and Andie is a bitch. This is further proven when Andie spots Blane at prom, leaves Duckie alone and ruined, and heads to the car park with Blane to play 'hunt for the toy in the cereal box.' That is the official ending. But, this is what I like to think happens next;

Duckie forms a New Wave band with the divine Iona who used to work at Trax with Andie. 

'Pearl necklaces are so, like, yesterday.'

They pen a hit song called 'Molly makes me want to puke pink'. They get the guy who made the film clip to Ah-Ha's 'Take on Me' and make a billion bucks. Duckie impregnates a Brazilian supermodel and Iona just continues being awesome.

Andie and Blane move to California where they get mixed up in a cult. Blane has many wives. Andie struggles to find meaning in her life until the cult leader recognises her amazing ability to take ugly curtains and make them into ugly clothes. He bestows her the highest honor by asking her to make the shrouds which will cover the cult members' bodies after the ritual, mass suicide. She makes them pink, then everybody drinks poisonous pink kool-aid in an effort to forget this movie ever existed. 

The end.

Write a letter forgiving an old enemy

Dear Woodridge State High School (WSHS),

Next year will mark the 20 year anniversary of our break-up. Twenty years! Considering we were only together for five years (grades 8-12, 1988-1993), it’s about time I forgave you. I think it’s important however to give you reasons as to why, for a long time, I considered you an enemy.

Firstly, I resented that substandard student attendance, a low socio economic catchment area, poor academic record and brutality on the sporting field branded us as ‘rough’ and ‘povo’*. I resented your complicity in offering up teenage pregnancy as a viable career option. I resented your proclivity for hiring teachers with dubious experience and even more dubious morals. Yes, it was true that Mr Ewell married a student and that the hot sports teacher was dealing ecstasy to the year 12 boys. I hated that calling someone a ‘poof’ was a-okay – nay, encouraged by you. I hated that you didn’t put a stop to the merciless bullying of that strange boy who wore perfectly ironed shorts and did ballroom dancing. I hated that I dyed my hair blonde and teased my fringe up into a fan shape for you. I also wore brown brogues with men’s knee high socks (scrunched down to mid calf) to try and please you. I hated that the absence of any career counselling left me with no ambitions greater than marrying Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam.  I hated that none of the basketball boys wanted to go out with me. I hated that anybody who had money or anybody displaying any form of talent was immediately shot down as being ‘up themselves’ or ‘stuck up’. I hate that this attitude has followed me through adulthood.

But, as this is supposed to be a letter of forgiveness, it’s important to remember the many things that I actually liked about our time together, Woodridge State High School. Firstly, I’ve you to thank for introducing me to the boy who would be my first ‘real’ boyfriend. We went on to spend over four years together – much of that time exploring the world (or at least the miserable bedsits of London).

‘Cultural diversity’ was not something to shout loud and proud about in the '80s and early '90s – but that’s what you offered – many years before it was fashionable to have brown-skinned friends. Sure, I didn’t see my first orthodox Jew until I was 22, but, sharing a class with beefy Tongans, impossible to understand (and impossibly cool) Maoris, and tough aboriginal kids gave me exposure to lives beyond my own white bread, comfortable home life. It also forced me to stand up for myself and recognise an injustice when I see it.

But, just one more thing before this gets too gushy...why do the kids of the year 2000s get to wear slightly tasteful uniforms? Perhaps you thought that pairing a yellow polo shirt with teenage acne helped keep the teenage pregnancy rate down?

Eagerly awaiting the 20 year reunion,

Kristen

*Popular slang in 1989 for ‘poverty’

 Thank you internet for not housing one photo of me from my school years. So, whilst this isn't my class, I wish it was.