Those Creative Types

This is a public health announcement: eat more meat.

Or, if you would prefer not to: make sure you eat citrus or tomatoes or capsicum with your meat substitutes (fish, nuts, seeds, legumes and dark green vegetables).  AND consider iron supplements.  I have decided to eat meat again as well as all these things, and the following story is my reason why.

I am making this PHA because I took what the nurse in ER at the Prince of Wales Hospital described to me as a “funny turn.”  She said this as she placed a lead coat over me, as someone was being x-rayed in the neighbouring cubicle.  

“In ER,” she said, “all young ladies who take a funny turn are pregnant until proven otherwise, so I’m just going to place this over you for a minute, OK?”  

Wait up.  I am starting this story in the middle.  Nobody get excited.  I am NOT pregnant.  That is not going to be the big reveal of this blog post.  Nor am I in anyway badly injured, lying in a hospital bed, blogging with my last ounces of life and energy.  ”Sweetheart, hand me my Mac…I just…have a few more words…to say…”

Nope.  This is a blog post to all my vegetarian friends (and you are numerous) and all my girlfriends (even more numerous).  You remember those ads from the 1990s?  ”I’m a single mother, with a daughter…”? Brought to you by the meat manufacturers of Australia?  

I was walking along, minding my own business, one bright and shiny Sunday morning about a month ago, when I suddenly couldn’t go any further.  As in, not one more step.  As in, collapsed.  Everything was very, very blurry and spinny.  I thought it was maybe a very bad period but after about 20 minutes of waiting until I could keep walking, I found that I had crumpled to the ground, not stood back up.  

A German woman jogging past came to our assistance - she was a doctor and, in the way of Germans and doctors, took the matter in hand.  She diagnosed me on the spot as dehydrated and anaemic.  The life savers made famous by Bondi Rescue stood nearby, alternately asking me if I could speak English and looking around to see when the doctor would come back and tell them what to do (she had run off to get me some water).  Unfortunately I couldn’t drink enough water to improve, so they called an ambulance.  

At the hospital, my pretty young doctor (Eydis, which means “fairy of the island,” from Iceland) took various blood samples, stuck a drip in me and then, as she and my nurse, Venus (from the Philippines, the type of efficient woman you try to make like you, even when you are barely conscious), leaned over me, covering me with piles of blankets (I was shivering like a leaf, what with my blood pressure being down around my ankles), she asked me about pain killers.

Dr E: What do you normally take for period pain?

Me: Nothing.  I’m allergic to ibuprofen. 

Dr E: (exchanges look with Venus, who smiles slightly).  So, you normally just rest with a hot water bottle?  For your level of pain?

Me: I can’t take anything, so, normally, yeah.

Venus: (nods at Dr E).

Dr E: Well, you’re not normally in hospital.  Would you like something for the pain?

Me: Like…(as hope dawns, the first rays of light into fuddled mind) what?

Dr E:  Basically, I can give you anything you want.  Aspirin, panadeine, panadeine forte…morphine…

Me: (Nervous giggle.)  Just…panadeine forte, then?  Morphine might be overdoing it.

Venus: (Walks away, I think, contemptuously.  I want her to like me, but seriously, morphine for period pain?)  

Anyway, so I miss my one great opportunity to take a completely legal opiod.  But panadeine forte is a wonderful drug, too, and pretty soon the pain, the drip, the bright lights, the entire surreality of the day blend into the surreality of pain numbness, and I am away.  

Moral of the story:  Check your iron stores next time you go to the GP.  I had always had regular anaemia checks, which never showed any problem, but they don’t check your stores (probably because it is not covered by Medicare).  Apparently, 20 is low.  After ten years of vegetarianism, mine were down to 8.  

If you’re female you need to be doubly careful.  Women, I now know, need twice as much iron in a day than blokes.  If you eat nuts and seeds and grain at breakfast with citrus, a legume and green veggie lunch (with citrus), and fish and greens (with citrus) for dinner, you should just scrape through, unless you are a bad absorber of iron (which I clearly am and which many people are).  You will probably still need to supplement though, with iron supplements, something like Florivital or spirulina.

Secondary moral of the story:  If you are offered anything you want in a hospital, take them up on the offer. It’s not like it’s going to hurt, is it? 

I just drove through the city to my husband-to-be’s house, and couldn’t help but crane my neck out the window to stare at the many World Youth Day pilgrims making their way home from the Pope’s appearance at Darling Harbour.  It’s a cold night here in Sydney.  The air is crisp, and a full moon rides high in the sky.  The pilgrims we drove past, in groups wearing matching beanies and jumpers and scarves and carrying the flags of the world, reminded me of nothing so much as a post-football crowd making its way home from the Telstra Dome on a Friday night in Melbourne.  And yet, they were so much more alien, more foreign to me than AFL fans (and that’s saying something - remember, I’m from working class Queensland, from a suburb where they call AFL ‘aerial ping-pong’ and where I didn’t even know there was another kind of rugby apart from league until I went to a game with my law school boyfriend.)

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It’s World Youth Day in Sydney this week.  So far, I have managed to avoid the “pilgrims” (all 500,000 of them) and have happily not been over-run, over-powered, or over-come with joy.  Even yesterday, as the dulcet tones of Guy Sebastian filtered through my windows, carried on the wings of the wind from the Bondi beach stage set up for the more rocking young Catholics, I managed to remain unmoved.  Even the rapping priest could not make a dint.  

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I caught the first fifteen minutes of the second episode of the ABC’s new show, The Hollowmen, last night, before Sydney’s excellent TV reception made it look too much like it actually snows inside Parliament House, something that it does not even do in Canberra.  

From those first fifteen minutes, I saw enough to make me remember painfully clearly what working at Prime Minister and Cabinet used to be like.

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I don’t have a cat that I could blame for dying.  I didn’t get talent spotted for the next NASA mission to outerspace (although if you’re reading this, NASA chiefs, I could do December).  Nor have I recently lost my memory of my entire life (that really happens, I saw it in a documentary), including the fact that I have a blog.

Much better than that.

Fellas, I got engaged.  There’s a ring and everything.  And can I just say that I now see the point of engagement rings.  Not only is a ring a useful prop (read: proof) when you tell your disbelieving friends, it also serves as a constant reminder to you and your affianced that 1. he asked, and 2. you said yes. 

I have a single distinct memory of being four years old, and naturally it involves food.  I was in Centrepoint shopping centre, the indoor mall of Woodridge.  At that time the shopping centre boasted a Coles and a Best and Less, a Wallace Bishop and a Dick Smith’s, and a pet shop that always smelt of hay and cute puppies.  There was also an ice-cream vendor in Centrepoint, and sometimes, if I had been really good, my mum would get me a tutti-frutti ice-cream, which I loved because it had all the colours (even at the age of four, I liked value for money).

On one such shopping trip, I had been very, very good, not squabbling with my sister a single time.  Mum stopped in front of the ice-cream store and I pressed my nose against the glass right in front of that rainbow miasma, the curled and creamy, the one and only, the giant tub of tutti frutti ice-cream, filling my peripheral vision.

“Cone or cup?”  the ice-cream girl asked.  She was wearing a lime-green, pink-trimmed apron, just like my soon-to-be, only it also had blue, and orange, and even yellow in its spectrum.  

I looked hopefully at my mum.  ”Cone?” I asked.  She nodded and before I knew it, I had an orange wafer cone clasped in my two hands, topped with a ball of tutti-frutti ice-cream.  

“Don’t drop it,” mum warned and I carefully stared at the ball of delight, licking as quickly as I could to stop it from melting in the tepid air-conditioning (if you’re from Brisbane, you’ll know how summer pooh poohs human attempts at cooling the air).  I advanced slowly down the mall, the sights of the shops around me fading to a mere patter of background brightness.  

Suddenly, without warning, the ice-cream scoop plopped to the ground.  I stood rooted to the spot, staring at the bright colours oozing into liquid mush, then dirt mixing with it, a stickiness where once there had been pure, unadulterated joy.  The vacuum cleaner demonstrator stationed a few steps ahead of me glanced over and tut-tutted, then went back to picking up a bowling ball with nothing but hot air.  

My mum turned around and spotted me and then she looked down and spotted the ice-cream.  ”C’mon, Jackie,” she said, thankfully seeing I had been punished enough by the loss and not scolding me for clumsiness.  She paused for a second, probably wondering if she could go back and ask the shop for another scoop, but she must have decided that it would meet the same fate anyway.  ”Got to leave it now.”

For a second I wondered if maybe I could scoop it off the ground; that perhaps it was still salvagable, and I could go on as before (perhaps a bit grittier but still, my one, my only).  Mum turned around to keep walking.  I still held the cone in my hands.  It had grown soft and mushy, the base beginning to disintegrate into wet crumbs sticking to my palms where the last tracks of tutti frutti now mixed with my lifeline and heartline.  

By the time we made it out of the shops, the feeling of heartbreak which I thought I would never recover from had completely dissipated.  The view from the car  was the most interesting thing I had ever seen.  Mum had cleaned my hands and I could make prints on the window with the moisture.  My feet didn’t touch the ground yet, and so I could kick and wriggle in the car seat to my heart’s content.  

Since then, since I was four years old, I feel like I have spent a lot more of my time and energy holding on to disappointments.  I lost the ease of feeling bitterly sad and then moving on that I had back then.  I have spent months, sometimes years, pondering what I perceived as broken promises made to me by life or other people, and more especially by myself.  Life has not always turned out as I had hoped.  

Last week, my friend asked me to marry him (my one, my only).  I didn’t stop to ask myself what I would do if the ice-cream fell to earth.  I just said yes with everything that makes up me.

I am so happy.  I don’t eat tutti-frutti any more, you know (too sweet for my ageing palate), but I have taken a diet of rainbows for free. 

Today is a day for polite regrets followed by hurried departures.  Make sure you are wearing a coat with very long-tails, the better to swirl through doorways as you take your leave.  Later, as the sun begins to set, your nose might begin to twitch.  The wind is changing.  Follow your animal instincts: paw the ground, howl at the half-lidded eye of the moon, sniff the air for prey-unwitting, guilelessly upwind of your path. 

It seems that your emotions might carry you right over the edge of the nearest waterfall.  But did you know that, with the lightest of touches, you can let go of the oars?  And find yourself, not falling, but floating well free of the entanglements of inexplicable wires and plastic buckets you thought might come in handy but have since simply got tangled up in your sea-legs?  Later on tonight, you will encounter a moment of gravity.  Smile and nod, but don’t feel you need to accompany it to its natural destination.  It can get there all by itself, and you can comfortably watch its back receding into the distance.  Who knows; without you there to keep it on course, it might find its way to an unexpected moment. 

jLo wrote an hilarious blog post responding to Ovagirl’s meme “Six Quirky Things About Me.”  She has asked others to respond and so I thought, well, it’s been a very long time since I had an idea about what to post on this blog, so why not?

Well.  The obvious proviso is that this cannot be as funny as jLo’s because she is by nature, funnier than me. And also, frankly, she has excellent quirky material.  

1. The Gattaca Approach to Housework

As jLo started her post with a quirky thing which I noticed about her, it’s only right that I start this post with one that I almost exclusively engage in when talking to her via skype.

Some time ago, jLo and I were revelling in our newfound voIP capabilities.  We were making the customary remarks about, oh, how crystal clear it was, hey, I can hear an ambulance drive past in London.  That sort of thing.  

jLo: Hey.  What’s that sound?

Me: What sound?

jLo: The clicking noise.  It’s sort of, swish, swish, click.  Can’t you hear it?

Me: (Pause.)  Is it the line, do you think?

jLo: Hmm.  It might be.

(Conversation continues.)

jLo: Hey! There it is again!

Me: (Click, swish, click).  What?

jLo: Come on!  It’s coming from your end!

Me: (Pause). It’s the sound of my paintbrush.

jLo: You’re painting while you talk to me?

Me: No.  I’m - cleaning my keyboard.

jLo: You’re what?

Me: It’s one of those small paintbrushes.  Not like for housepainting.  You know, the little ones, for fine art work.

jLo: –

Me: My keyboard gets really dirty!
jLo: –

Me: Like Ethan Hawke in Gattaca.  I like my workstation to be pristine.

jLo: Why? In case the feds find out you’re keeping Jude Law in a back room supplying you with urine?

Me: You didn’t have to say that.  

2. Starving children in Ethiopia

This one is not so much a quirk as an individual example of the greed and gluttony that is rampant in the West.  I could blame my mum for always making me clean my plate of my food before leaving the table, but it’s not really about her.  It’s about me, being unable to start a tub of ice cream, no matter the size, flavour or general position on the sick-making scale, without also finishing it on the same day.  The same goes for a block of chocolate.  I’ve tried different tactics for trying to make it last for more than a day - even a week, that would be something.  So far the best approach I have come up with to reduce my unnecessary calorie loading is - buy smaller tubs.  

3. My favourite sub-atomic particle

I have a thing for astrophysics and quantum mechanics.  I used to want to be an astrophysicist until I met an astronomer so disillusioned by his inability to make a dint in the ultimate understanding of the Universe that he convinced me a room full of budding nerds that we were better off keeping herb gardens and keeping our eyes fixed on the ground.  Nevertheless, I persist in reading popular science books with names like “Black Holes and The Universe,” “Physics and Philosophy,” and “The Book of Nothing.”  I enjoy having my mind bent in upon itself, and I like feeling like I understand something that is, by nature, incomprehensible to human beings, even for a fleeting moment.  I have read enough to have decided that my favourite sub-atomic particle is the neutrino, because they are small, apparently do nothing, but just by existing, have something to do with the overall balance of the Universe.  I guess I feel like we have a few things in common.

4. Speaking of balance

Dr Maz and I both do this.  If we are going for a walk, we have to find something to walk to and then come back.  You can’t just walk along the beach, and stop and turn around.  That would feel impossibly weird.  When we walk together, we don’t have to justify it; we don’t even talk about it.  We just both head straight for the yellow flag, go around it, and head home, and the world has been saved from sliding off into anarchy and craziness yet again. 

5. Jackie and Ed’s Movie Show

I have the Editor to thank for this insight.  He and I did some hard-core film festival attending a couple of years ago, when I lived in Melbourne.  We would review the films we had seen to each other afterwards.  It was then that The Editor first told me that I review films in a singularly thematic way, skipping all the actual detail.  When he pointed that out to me I realised with horror how wanky my film reviews are and I tried for a while to modify them, but despite my good intentions, I’m still a hopelessly abstract movie-reviewer.  Ed, you should know better than to ask me by now!

Here’s an example of the kind of phone conversation we might have:

Me: So what was “Lars and the Real Girl” about?

The Editor: About this guy who buys a plastic blow-up doll, and turns it into his girlfriend.  And then his brother and sister-in-law take him to the doctor, and the doctor becomes his therapist.  And then…(etc).  So, what about “No Country for Old Men?”

Me: It was about the amorality of god and how that plays out in a deterministic fashion in every man’s life, and how these lives interact to create the unavoidable chain of causation that makes up the world we live in.

The Editor: Ah-huh.  So, but what was it actually about?

6. Rinsing

This is not so much a quirk as a bad habit.  Everyone I know rinses the dishes after they wash up.  For a long time, I really didn’t see the point.  Are a few suds really going to harm you?  I remember at a writer’s retreat, there were four of us sitting around and, not wanting to talk for one more minute about our attempts at writing, my friend Ro asked, “How do you guys wash up?”  Tom looked like he wanted to laugh at the question, but Ro looked very serious, and I could relate: everyone wants to know if they’re normal.

Cate answered her first, describing the fairly standard Aussie approach of filling the sink with suds and water, washing, and rinsing afterwards.  Tom piped in when he realised it was a real topic of conversation, saying that sometimes he might wash the “Asian” way without the sinkplug, tossing water from one dish to the next and occasionally adding fresh water.  

When it was my turn, I nodded and said, “I do it like that, too.  Like both of them.”  I didn’t mention my failure to rinse, not wanting them to look at me like I was causing my future children’s deformity by all the detergent I was ingesting.  Nowadays I eat organic food and I use smelly, non-chemical soaps, washing powder and even toothpaste (when I can find one that doesn’t look too gross), and I do the dishes the “Asian way” to save water.  I rinse very thoroughly, when I think anyone is watching.

You may be feeling shy, and want the world to make you an offer you can’t refuse rather than having to put yourself out there, on the corner, holding a paper bag lunch and hoping for a miracle new friend to show you the way things could be.  Nice shoes, by the way.  But even when lying in your own bed you know that the safety of the sheets can’t go on forever.  It’s for you that they are waiting, for you that their hands are half raised, ready to applaud.  You might get some cat-calls but hell, at least it’s noise, and the world is a better place for the sharing of the airwaves between love, hate and the what-all in-between.  Get out there.  Add your voice to the chorus-line and listen to the world screech and sing with you in it.

Dear people, why the sad faces?  It’s a day for newspaper reading, drinking tea and generally celebrating quietly, inside your heart, how nice it is to be so lucky.  You may find it hard to get back on track with your various goals.  This doesn’t make you less good; it just means your expectations of yourself need updating.  Keep them fluid, like the sun on petals or the dew that crystallises on a raindrop on a pretty cold morning.  Even pigeons are allowed time out from scavenging to canoodle on rooftops and the occasional eave.  Today, you should find yourself a friend.  Groom her face feathers with your beak, metaphorically speaking. Go ahead and take your time; take all the time that you need.