Honestly I could probably sleep through a hurricane.

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Deciding that I should probably attempt to grow up and to join the real world I went and got myself a real life boyfriend (Rowbi). I’ve been single on and off for a couple of years and while most people would wake up gazing into the eyes of their lovers I would wake up to this:

First thing in the morning the cat wants breakfast and I to continue to sleep. So every night we have this same discussion.

Me: zzzzzz

Cat: MEOW MEOW MEOW

Me: shhhh

Cat: MEOW MEOW MEOW

Me: Die!!!!

Cat: MEOW MEOW MEOW

Then she jumps on my bed and sleeps near me. Sleeping with the cat is like being strapped to a torture apparatus of some description and every time you move ever so slightly you get an electric shock. Every time I move ever so slightly, the cat thinks that I’m about to get up and starting meowing at me. My friend called her the "trip-wire kitty".

She’s also gone deaf and bit senile so she sometimes forgets that my Mum has given her breakfast and comes into my room to wake me up just for shits and giggles. Also telling her to shut-up literally falls on deaf ears. Her strategy for keeping me from sleeping reached new heights this year when she realised that if she monopolised access to my pillow I would be more likely to get up. Additionally she is super comfortable and within inches of my ears so the meows are particularly intrusive.

I’m actually pretty good at sleeping despite the meowing though and honestly once I’m fully asleep I could probably sleep through a hurricane. I also can hardly concentrate until I had a decent dose of caffeine. Someone could break into the house and murder Rowbi and I will be of no use to him until I wake up and get a cup of coffee. Then and only then will it occur to me that his lifeless body should probably be causing me concern.

You see I have learnt to sleep with noisy things.

In year 9, at my high school, you spend a year at a rural campus living in houses of between 9 and 12 squealing 14 year-olds. We all slept within about 20 metres of each other so there was a lot of night time chatting and sing-a-longs and such. If for some reason you did need to get an early night, you learnt to sleep while people were giggling, dancing to the Fresh Hits of ’02 and discussing the best process for hanging up posters of Josh Harnett. If you were sick, you slept with noise or died.... or went to the sick bay which meant spending time with the dimmest nurse in the history of mankind which was equivalently painful as dying. In the morning, we had to be ready by 8:30am so my best friend and I always got up at about 8:27. (At this point feel free to be impressed that I can make the bed of a top bunk and get dressed in 3 minutes). Because we got up as late as possible, this meant that we had to be able to sleep through the chirping of early rising housemates getting their worms.

Also I’ve had boyfriends from about the age of 16 and have had to share beds with people most Friday and Saturday nights for the past 5 years on account of my hobby of getting drunk so the presence of a second or third person in my bed does not faze me, even if that person is a stranger.

Earlish in the morning, my mother also like to make phone calls and discuss unimportant things with my father like baby-sitting my brother’s children the following Tuesday. Her inside voice is still pretty loud and she thinks that I’m a bit lazy so her sympathy for waking me up is miniscule.

Also I live on a busy street and in a flimsy house made mostly of glass so I hear cars roaring and drunken bogans quarrelling all night. I also live across the road from a public swimming pool. This means that during the non-opening hours of the pool (ie the middle of the night) trucks are constantly pulling up and conducting some sort of activity that involves a great deal of pumping. During this process, the truck has to be kept running for some reason so it continues to huff and puff until you’re ready to blow your head in. This is usually finished off with a Greek plate smashing ceremony of some description. I’m not sure why plates have to be smashed as part of running a public swimming pool but that is most certainly what it sounds like. This whole thing is finished at the crack of dawn and just in time for the swim squad to start and the sound of the coach saying “Set and go” and then blowing a whistle. Then splashing. Set and go” and then blowing a whistle. Then splashing. And repeat 100 times.

Despite my ability to sleep through virtually anything I was unexpectedly woken up from my slumber the other day though. It was a Sunday there was some sort of carnival happening at the swimming pool and this man said over the loudspeaker at about 10 in the morning (I was still in bed with meowing cat) “We’d like to thank everyone for coming down... You’ve made it great”. He sounded like he was actually standing in my bedroom and I thought to myself “Oh did I have an orgy last night? Funny, that doesn’t sound like something that I would do but there is a strange man in my bedroom praising a large group of people for a huge team effort.” And then for a moment I thought that maybe it was someone was trying to auction my house even though we were in it and hadn’t really indicated that we wished to sell it.

I sat up and realised what was going on. I thought I would attempt to get a bit more sleep and as I turned to straighten out my pillow and doona and stuff before settling back in, I saw what Sneaky Snooze Faced McGee had achieved in the half a second I had been distracted:

So the sleep-in was off and I struggled to get out of bed and on with my day. It was OK though because Shelley’s OK.

Love,

Elle xx

Agree to Disagree

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I don’t know about you but I really hate getting into conversations on controversial topics with people I don’t know well.

With family and friends I love nothing more to discuss feminist issues, the economy, carbon taxes and such. Even if these people have wildly different opinions to me, I can always find a way of getting into a healthy debate.

The problem with people you don’t know well is that (a) you have no idea what their views are and (b) you have no idea how they will react if their views are challenged.

If someone is overtly racist or homophobic I’m not going to put up with that and I will also assert my feminism from time to time if I’m backed into a corner. Having said that I mostly attempt to steer clear of topics of conversation that are likely to result in conflict with co-workers, friends of friends and anyone else with whom I’d prefer to have a totally mundane and functional relationship.

“I mean George Bush wasn’t really a bad president.”

“Um, I just remembered that I have to go buy a... hat. In case my head gets a bit cold later. See ya!”

From time to time though, we all find ourselves in a situation where despite our best intentions; we disagree with someone we’d really prefer not disagree with.

This steams from accidentally thinking that you agree when you don’t.

“Suzie and Francine are going to be late. Typical.”

 

“Ergh, I know she’s always like that!"

“It’s because she thinks that she’s the centre of the universe.”

“OMG I know, I had no idea that you thought that!!! Wow, yeah she’s just so full of herself. I mean I know that she had cancer and all and that’s sad blah blah but that was, you know, years ago and she’s totally milking it for the pity. I mean, don’t be such a victim, just because you had cancer doesn’t mean that you can treat other people like dirt.”

“Oh wait, you’re talking about Suzie, I mean Francine is a bit full of herself. I like Suzie.”

At this point you cannot backtrack, you can’t smooth it over, the truth is out, you disagree about whether or no Suzie is a massive horrible person or not. U-G-L-Y.

“No I mean I like Suzie...”

“You just said that you didn’t. She had cancer you know. Oh wait here she comes now!”

The problem here was that you would never have said all those horrible things if you thought that your friend didn’t agree. You are lulled into a sense of security by what you think is common ground, common ground that turns out to be quicksand.

My best friend spends a good portion of her day avoiding getting into conversations with ignorant people about politics. Pretending to check your phone is a good strategy.

“I mean they’re queue-jumpers really.”

“Sorry, I missed all that... I was just sending a text to a friend about dinner, dinner tonight that I intend to eat. With a fork and possibly knife I guess... I mean it depends on the food, maybe it’ll be Asian... um... um... Ooohhh Masterchef! Interesting stuff hey!”

My best friend doesn’t even watch Masterchef, it’s just that it was a good way to get the conversation moving towards something safer.

Recently; however, she did get herself into a political conversation with a colleague. Her co-workers were discussing the carbon tax and pretty much talking about how they didn’t want to pay it. My best friend busied herself with work sensing that she had entered dangerous territory.

Considering that she’s an intelligent woman, it would be surprising to other people how engrossed in her files she was.

“Oooohhh, this file is for Bank West, so fascinating, wow, just wow. A Bank West file. I mean this file will need to be filed.”

“OK guys, I’m just going to copy some documents for this fascinating Bank West file, see ya.”

While working on the Bank West file with the kind of surgical precision that Michalengo was famous for, a colleague struck up a conversation.

“This whole carbon tax debate is just silly don’t you think!”

“I KNOW!!!!! Everyone in this office is so misinformed.”

“Well, you know, they often are. Oh, it’s terrible, you know I mean the Australian economy is doing so much better than the rest of the developed world, we’re in such a good position.”

My best friend was so relieve to have found someone who had some sense....

“EXACTLY, I mean what’s the point of having this amazing economy and such high standards of living if there’s no...”

“Ohhhhh..... We don’t actually agree.”

Shelley’s made it out OK though, so no need to panic.

Xx Smelle

 

Sometimes nothing is better than ‘better than nothing’.

I used to work for an accounting firm as an administration assistant.

As such, I’m sure you will understand the profound need for a decent amount of caffeine.

The firm was too stingy to by a decent coffee machine so we all had cheap instant stuff which was a bit depressing but it was better than nothing. And by better than nothing I mean that in the same way that getting brown leather school shoes from Santa is better than getting nothing.

As you can imagine, news that we were getting a coffee machine was met with delight office-wide.

We got the coffee machine not because of a stroke of generosity on the part of our bosses but because we did the accounts for this coffee machine company. The company had gone broke and couldn’t pay their bill. So they offered us a coffee machine as a form of payment.

Better than nothing hey.

Or not.

Once the coffee machine arrived it became pretty clear why the company had gone broke. It was a fussy little thing. Also because the company that made it no longer existed, to get it repaired you had to follow a certain formal process. This basically involved going and getting the receptionist and watching her poke and prod it until it started whirring again.

Something this coffee machine was really good at was breaking. More impressively, it seemed to stuff your coffee up in so many different ways. It wasn’t like “Oh from time to time, the printer gets a paper jam in the 4^th tray” sort of malfunctions. The wide varieties of the way in which this coffee machine could crap itself were nothing short of impressive.

One ‘feature’ of the coffee machine was that when you asked it to make a drink, it used some coffee making skills to put something into your mug. At this point, it decided its work was done regardless of how much the final product resembled the drink that you ordered.

It did seem to understand though that different buttons were requesting different products so it actually made an effort to make each drink different. Over time I learnt how to translate the coffee machine’s button labels into what the coffee machine thought that they meant.

So sometimes nothing is probably better than ‘better than nothing’. You know what’s better than both, Shelley... She’s OK.

Xx

Smelle

Why my mother is really good at being Japanese.

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I originally wrote this post just a few days before the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and I thought it would be in poor taste to post it whilst their country was facing its darkest hour. Then about a week ago I was going to write a post about how my best friend dressed up as Amy Winehouse on Halloween so I’ve realised that I am able to foresee death and destruction. As such I am trying to break this cycle by posting about Japan because their disaster has already happened. My hope is the space-time continuum will use this paradox constructively and right itself. In the mean time, subjects on my posts face huge risks, today my mother will probably have something bad happen to her but she’s a forceful woman so I’m fairly confident she’ll cope.

Travelling is a wonderful experience, I’m sure you’d agree. My only real gripe is that the way you imagine yourself experiencing a place never quite measures up to reality.

The photos that you bring home reveal the truth. I’m not a true high maintenance kind of girl really but I have noticed that I do not have the kind of hair that travels well. Limp, greasy, fly-aways, odd curly bits, my hair covers it all.

SPAIN - Imagined

SPAIN - Actual

FRANCE - Imagined

FRANCE - Actual

MOROCCO - Imagined

MOROCCO - Actual

Recently my brother, mother and I made a last minute dash to Japan to ski. A bi-product of the skiing was the spending of time in Japan.

My skis were purchased in France and were originally trained up on French snow. To their total disgust they discovered themselves being put on an aeroplane and taken to a foreign land. They have since been forced to ski in Australian conditions. Skiing in Australia is an extreme sport. Slush, grass, rocks, ice, rain and sunshine combine together to make for a ski season that lasts all of five and a half minutes before it everything melts. As a result of these conditions you have to be extremely accurate when skiing to make sure that your skis stay in contact with actual snow. Occasionally when my French skis have had enough of these appalling conditions, they simply refuse to do as they are told.

They do this to make a point. “We are European skis. We deserve better. Until you get this into your head, we shall make you fall on it”.

It turns out that Franco-Nippon relations are much better. With snow as their only common language, the mountains of Japan and the skis of France danced gracefully together. I came along for the ride purely as a freeloader, a witness to the love making of mankind’s knack for elegant design and Mother Nature’s gift for turning water into white fluffy stuff.

The skis weren’t the only ones who took to Japan.

Our hotel was booked at the last minute so we were staying in one that is pretty much a Japanese hotel with few westerners staying there. This was actually really great because we got a more authentic experience. I slept on a slim Japanese mattress on the floor. The mattress had virtually no padding, I think its soul purpose is to prevent carpet burn. This did wonders for my back, skiing by day and hard core chiropractic work by night.

Our room contained no chairs so we sat on the floor cross legged as if we were about to meditate. Also there was a huge communal bathroom and natural hot springs down in the basement and we were provided with kimono dressing gowns and these little grey Japanese-style collared PJs that mum and I, continuing in the spirit of being culturally insensitive, nicknamed “Mao suits.”

My mother is well travelled but had never been to Japan. As it turns out, she is really good at being Japanese. 

Mum wearing the kimono dressing gown provided by the hotel.

Mum in the natural hot springs (onsen).

Mum conducting a tea ceremony in her Mao suit (English breakfast tea with a dash of milk, no sugar).

One sunny morning, whilst my easily freckled mother applied a thick layer of SPF a billion plus house paint to her face, my brother and I packed up the camera for some happy snaps. Mum decided that if photos were going to be taken she should apply some pink lipstick.

Mum being sunsmart and wearing lipstick = geisha style for the 21^st century (although the red hair brings a certain clown atheistic that the original geisha tend not to display).

She also used my brother’s knock-off iPad. For someone who uses two hands to press the buttons on a remote control, this kind of technology use was entirely out of character but when in Rome, one does as the Romains do. I was half expecting her work blackberry to come home covered in glow-in-the-dark Hello Kitty paraphernalia.

Our camera actually broke while we were skiing so the geisha will have to be remembered via my artistic interpretation of the events. This was pretty shitty but there is no reason to panic because at least Shelley’s OK.

Xx Smelle