I am fairly live and let live, I really am,

but if I hear you order a

bacardi

and

pineapple juice

(with extra ice),

I will judge you.

Openly.

Yes, I will.

It’s still hot

I’ve been writing a set of essays which I hope will one day be published either singularly or as the set that I am constructing them as.

Actually, I think they are more memoir than they are essays, but memoir sort of declares to the world that you are a fascinating person to whom fascinating things have happened, whereas I am a person who made a couple of extraordinarily stupid decisions, attempted to make up for them by making even more and increasingly stupid decisions, then thought that writing non-fiction would be a good (by which I mean, among other things, legitimate) way to further avoid the frightningness that is the second draft of my next piece of fiction and, lacking both the expertise and the gumption to investigate any other subject beyond myself in any depth, thought I may as well write about those stupid decisions.

I did wonder whether I would have anything to say that I haven’t already blogged about. I mean, goodness me, I’ve been rather revealing over these last couple of months. Perhaps, I thought to myself, blogging is a substitute for memoir. But the more I wrote offline, the more I realised that this was an issue barely worth a second thought. For one thing, there’s heaps I haven’t blogged about (for example, you don’t know what my grandmother said to the mister the day we told her we were getting married). But really, it’s not an issue, because as with all these questions, the answer is not an either/or. Blogging and memoir share some similarities, but they are different. Different processes, different results.

While the blog helps me to record things immediately and does provide an opportunity to think and reflect on the things that happen to me, it is altogether a different kind of thought and reflection than I have been doing while writing the essays.

Most of the differences come back to the same thing of course. The immediacy of blogging versus the ‘looking back’ of memoir. Because memoir demands a cohesive narrative beyond the simple chronological narrative of my blog, I feel that it is forcing me to explore situations and emotions more fully, to contextualise everything (for myself if not for the reader, at the moment, everything is done for myself because the reader is still a concept, a potential, rather than an actual).

My blog is a photo album, filled with snapshots where the essays, although potentially stand-alone, are a film.

And actually, that little analogy is bloody brilliant and has just helped me to fill in the gaps of one of the chapters essays I’ve been trying to write, so if you’ll excuse me I’m turning the interwebs off again and re-opening my increasingly large, but ever-more wieldy document.

PS One thing I’m surprised about is the amount of effort I have put into thinking about ego and narcissim and so forth. You’d think blogging would’ve moved me way past those worries. But no.
‘Do you think it’s too self-centred?’ I asked the mister of a piece I gave him to read the other night (this is unusual, I rarely let him read anything).
‘Well, didn’t you say it’s memoir?’ he asked in his engineering way.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I really don’t understand you.’

We interrupt this metaphorical flow…

I will never forget the night of the last election, and by the time my dad got to our place, they were already saying Bennelong was too close to call and what a night it was, and my children will always remember that they were allowed to stay up until midnight playing computer games, only we kept making them come and stand in front of the television because this is history and the next day I felt like this great veil of mean-spirited conservatism had lifted from us all.

We drank too much sparkling red, but the hangover was worth it.

We knew, we always knew, that this wouldn’t be a revolutionary government, that things would carry on much as before but we believed that now we would be led by people who, even if they were conservative, would lead with more generous spirits. We believed that the lines in the sand would shift (oh, a metaphor, how did that sneak in?).

That’s why this whole asylum seeker and ringing the Indonesian government and expanding the Christmas Island detention centre is utterly and absolutely depressing. There’s some actions on the Amnesty International website and doing them will make me feel better about myself, but not about much else.

And what I’m also remembering is the day my dad and I had another of our heated discussions, back when Latham let Howard set the agenda on refugees and asylum seekers once again, and I could not believe that Dad could still be a member of the ALP. One of those times when Latham didn’t just say, as he should have done, ‘No, enough is enough’. (It might have been the Tampa, but who knows, I mean there have been so many moments where I’ve thought, ‘Well, it can’t get worse’, but then it has). Surely, I said to Dad this, this is the tipping point, and he gave his old, once-relevant, but to my mind no-longer-so, speech about change from within. He remained loyal to the ALP, and he probably still would.

I feel let down.
(updated to add: as would he)

Know when to fold em

Cakes are less easily redrafted.

Good writing is rewriting

So I was halfway down the third seam of my second skirt when I remembered I was sewing trousers.

It’s that kind of skirt

So I was putting the fnishing touches to a skirt which fits but does not flatter, and my mind turned to other matters, like this, that and the other, and it occurred to me that if I were a word, I would not be eponymous.

For while eponymous does its job of being one word where otherwise there would need to be three most excellently, it is the kind of word which is only ever used when a person needs another person to know that they are the kind of person who knows the meaning of the word eponymous.

Good things

My, but I’m a sucker for a bunch of schoolkids singing. I am, you are…zippedee doo dah…der glumph went the little green frog, it really doesn’t matter. Kids sing, I cry. So, despite it all, I had a pretty awesome time in the school assembly this morning watching eldest boy singing Education Rocks and youngest boy reciting There was an Old Lady.

Wish I could be at the Adelaide Town Hall tonight (or maybe it’s tomorrow night by now).

In two months, we will have been here for twelve (excepting the five I’ve spent away)

The problem with tryng to make rational, reasoned decisions is that all rational, reasonable arguments have perfectly rational, reasonable flip-sides. There are just as many reasonable reasons that I should stay as there are reasonable reasons that I should leave.

It’s a big decision, and I’ve more or less made it, but all the same, I keep looking around and thinking, But if other people can make it work, why can’t I?

The other day, the mister said, ‘You know, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. You don’t have to justify that to anyone. You don’t even have to justify it to yourself if you don’t want to.’

Maybe he just said it because he’s sick of the circular conversations (fuck knows I am), but I tell you that man is wasted as an engineer.

And now we are exhausted

On the weekend, we went to Sharjah.

We had this view from our hotel room:

From sharjah

The hotel was filled with visiting Russians. I have no idea why so many Russians come and visit Sharjah, but they do.

We walked along the Corniche at dusk;

From sharjah

we saw some bags of bread;

From sharjah

We obeyed the signs.

From sharjah

>>>>
The next day, we saw a decorated truck;

From sharjah

got lost in the Heritage Area;

From sharjah

did not go into this shop;

From sharjah

but looked into this one.

From sharjah

We walked past this sign;

From sharjah

through this souk;

From sharjah

and past these shops.

From sharjah

We desperately wanted to buy some more crystals.

From sharjah

On the way home, we drove through University City

From sharjah

past a sign:

From sharjah

and spent some time behind these camels.

From sharjah

One answer

In her last comment, Helen asked, ‘What kind of jobs are available in AD (apart from construction/engineering)? Is it easy for an expatriate who isn’t an engineer/builder/developer to get work? Is there a special dress code for women?’

I shall begin with the dress code. Simply put, expat women seem to wear pretty much what they like, though women from my background generally dress more conservatively than they might at home. I have a couple of sun dresses, for example, which are strappy numbers that I wear around the house, but wouldn’t wear outside. At the swimming pool, there are plenty of bikinis, though I myself continue to wear my sensible all-covering bathers, because I have been raised on ’slip slop slap’ and also I burn easily and also have always found sunbathing excrutiangly boring (when I say always, I mean the two times I’ve done it). Local girls and women and Muslim expats often wear the full-length bathers, but others wear bathers similar to mine.

Coming home from the gym, I sometimes stop at a shop to pick up a newspaper or milk, and I keep a shirt in the car that I put on over the top of my gym gear, because I wear singlets to the gym and, for many different reasons, would feel uncomfortable dressed like that in the shop.

I often carry a scarf which I can wrap around myself which is also a useful defence against the ubiquitous air-condiitoning.

The malls all have signs asking that you dress appropriately, which means covered shoulders and skirts/dresses/pants that go below the knees and tops that are not low-cut. It wouldn’t be unusual to see uncovered shoulders at the malls, but it isn’t common.

Local women (Emiratis) wear an abaya (the black robe), and sheyla (head covering) which is considered to be the national dress. Many do veil their faces, but many don’t. Some women wear a ‘burkha’ which here is the leather mask covering the mouth, eyes and cheekbones (I think, don’t quote me on that). The burkha isn’t all that common, but you would always see at least one woman wearing one. Local men wear the dishdash (white robe) and headdress.

There’s lots of shops catering to Indian expats. One of the easiest ways to buy fabric is to buy a set for the sari suit, which is two larger pieces of fabric (one to make the top and one to make the pants) and a smaller piece for the scarf. I’ve bought more fabric than I really need, simply because it is so easy to buy it that way. Mind you, one of my friends from India told me that all of the fashions here are ‘out of date’. I have never been in date, so it doesn’t really matter.