To bother or not to bother? That is the question, as I approach the still point in the turning world and the point of no return (or at least no tax return due to my frustration with this leisure pursuit) in turning forty very shortly.
Literary theory is definitely high up on the list. The garden, acting, French linguistics and fine dining are also there. Singing, well, it might have been had not my pubescence involved a curtailed chorally based scholarship and subsequent placement in an imploding music school in Melbourne. Melbourne - it’s there too. And snow. Sleeping in, late nights, g-string knickers. Yup. If I may be so bold. All there. Gold rings. Silver earrings. And another, just to pick one of myriad choices, high impact aerobics.
I like every one of these things. Some, over time, have become obsessions. The catch is that I understand only too well my ability to fall in lust with the idea of world supremacy over all newfound pursuits in self-actualisation. Yet, the heat dies, the pheromones take a shower, the gas goes out on MasterChef and the Olympics conclude, every four years, yet again, despite my love letters begging otherwise. It is at this point I am cyclically shamed to discover that I’ve cried EVERY time a package appeared before an ad break with a smorgasbord of gold medal swimming/diving/sprinting/marathon/javelin performances. And they’re all accompanied by Newton Faulkner.
So, to clarify, I like all of these things. It’s just that, facing brutal reality, I’m not very good at them. Not in the slightest. So, should I continue to bother with them at all?
Let’s see now…
Garden. Well, anyone who knows me wouldn’t waste the muscles rolling their eyeballs, my herbivorous touch of death and all. Somehow, most bizarrely, I did assist in the successful chlorophycation of several sunflowers this year. A first. Not just in the growing of sunflowers, but procreating florally in general. I was under pressure though. Kindy project for my eldest daughter and all, had to impress. Bluff. Yet both she and the sunflowers failed to call it and we had life!
They’re all dead now. A good friend has explained that I should put paper bags over their heads to collect their dropping seeds. I’m struggling with this, strangely enough, as it seems counterintuitive to want to suffocate the last life out of the one thing I haven’t killed off through apathy in the first place.
Acting. I had an agent in Melbourne. Went for a Target audition once. I was worried sick that day as the call had come during my teaching period one (Year 11 English) and I’d replied the affirmative that I could be there at 4pm. The cause of the angst was that I detested the undies I was wearing. That day, a Monday, was big-chundy-undies day. I hadn’t had the courage to face the washing on the weekend and I was wearing what one might call bloomers. They would have worked well in a
Picnic at Hanging Rock scene, where the plain chick snags her undies on a twig climbing through the rock maze all sweaty and then disappears and no one sees her or her undies again. Or cares. I just wished I’d worn something a bit more elegant, delicate, a g-string even. This was particularly as the pair of black pants I was wearing were struggling to cope with the folds of saggy cotton huddling amongst my buttocks, vying for space in the dark crevices of that winter afternoon.
I arrived at the audition and sat wallflowerlike in a downstairs room with three other women and one man also sitting wallflowerlikely, eyes not making much contact, heads no doubt jabbering on with their internal discussions about who the Target peeps would be picking to advertise their latest…
What was the company advertising this time? Electronics? Books? Discounted baby clothes? NO one else in the room appeared interested in or able to enlighten me, so I sat stony, praying to the gods of Tar-jay my undies wouldn’t show above the top of my black pants whenever my time came to do…whatever it was the powers that be upstairs might be about to challenge me with.
‘Ms Batchelor?’ A woman. Dressed in black, wiry black hair, grim looking and on a mission to exclude, called me from the bottom of the steps. I rose (releasing wedgie with little subtlety) and followed her up the steps.
‘So, you’ve read the script?’
‘Uh.’ Yeah. Good one. Dick. What ph*&^g script? I hadn’t seen a script. Had there been a script? Had anyone been reading the script? Did anyone point to a script when I came in? (A duh, as if they would. This world is FIERCE). ‘Was there a…script?’
She looked back at me kindly.
In your dreams.
She looked back at me like I was a dick. Which I realised I was. And in chundy undies, providing nothing if not a little extra warmth on this grievously brittle Melbourne winter afternoon.
‘Right.’ Sigh. Too audible.
I smiled. No, beamed. Determined to impress, I took the resilience-in-adversity approach and put on ‘jolly’. Jolly jolly, hoho. Ho.
‘You are playing a wife and mother. It’s a busy morning before school and you’re trying to organise yourself for work, whilst your family are all begging you to find various pieces of clothing for the day. In this ad, you spend fifteen seconds responding to their calls by running back and forth from your kitchen out to the washing line, upon which all the underwear hangs. It is chilly outside. Icelandic chilly. And you too are wearing your...
I get it. Underwear.
Again. I smiled. No, beamed. Determined to impress, I stripped down down to my pearly whites and my not quite tight enough chundy undies and jiggle and wiggle and run up and down the passageway of this frigid Melbourne flat, playing mother hen.
All I could think was, smile like it’s frozen on you, girl. At least you didn’t come to the audition wearing a g-string...
I’ll keep it sweet with the others.
G-strings. See above. (Warning, someone may make you run semi naked somewhere at any point in time and you need to be prepared).
Melbourne. See above also. If someone’s going to make you run semi naked anywhere, you don’t want it to be somewhere your bits are frozen.
Snow. An exaggerated vision of Melbourne. Plus, the small incident of having to be rescued from atop a blizzarding Kosciuszko one night.
Literary theory. Has anyone ever in the history of text analysis, really truly, truly ruly, had any ph***ing IDEA what Jacques Derrida was banging on about?
French. Wee wee manure. That's about as good as it gets. Plus, I was once told that a croissant with butter and jam has the equivalent calories (kilojoules, whatever, but putting it in kilojoules induces apocalyptic terror) of three pieces of thick toast buttered on both sides.
600 000 calories
Fine dining. Love to cook, useless at following recipes. Bo-RING. This means I am a walking advertisement for rubbery chicken, gluggy rice (didn’t think you could get it wrong in a rice cooker, did ya?), charcoal damper and soufflops.
. It’s not the gold rings I mind. It’s when your fiancé buys you a gold engagement ring and it’s actually thinly veiled nickel. You also pay for it yourself from your overdrawn credit account, it rubs off, genie like, until its green on the inside, even though it’s an amethyst not an emerald, and gives you for near ten years now, the most gravelly, ripped skin eczema known to the human finger.
Silver earrings. Ditto. Replace finger with ear(s).
Sleeping in. Moot point, never get to: Children. And then when I do, bored, bored, bored. I should have added breakfast in bed to that. Uneven. Cluttered. Uncomfortable. And who gets to clean up anyway?
Late nights. I have the circadian rhythm of a mountain goat. They get the jitters by 4pm, wondering when last light’s going to be upon them and bleating ferociously until their shepherd guides them safely to the green, green grass of hearth, home and doona, by 8pm. At the latest. Put it this way, even in my early 20s out at parties, I would often be led, by my self defeating physiology, to ask the host where the nearest bed was. And no, not a shag in sight. Or generally not anyway. I just needed a little kip. And would thus sleep, wake by 6.30 completely hungoverless, and remind myself that the world needs nerds. Surely I wasn't the only one on the planet to behave in such an incomprehensibly daggy fashion?
This leaves
high impact aerobics. I was an aerobics instructor for several years, a gym junkie in the years surrounding this, a tae bo instructor following that. I lived, ate, slept, bled 45 minute Music and Motion dance mixes for the better part of the 1990s. This was the era of the lurid lycra g-string pants OVER the lurid lycra leotard shorts (another bad sign for the g-string). I adored, and still adore, aerobics. Every shin splint, every chronic foot syndrome, bruise, Diet Coke addiction and push ups obsession. I was anaemic and as bony as a ghost in a skeleton costume. I was a machine.
Now I have produced two offspring and both the ghost and the machine leak.
I believe the fancy ads call it ‘LBL’*. I call it lame, but may well get the whole lot strung up and tied in a knot to the closest available free internal organ. Maybe then I’ll brave the g-string again.
* Light bladder leakage: As ‘light’ in leakage as the ‘morning’ in morning sickness is in the morning.
