I’ve briefly emerged from my frenzy of teaching/writing/moving-house-yet-again, and realised I missed the whole Fringe. In itself, that’s not too tragic, but I also missed – completely, thoroughly, systematically – to reply to, even to read, any of the invitations to Fringe shows. Some of them were very, very nicely phrased, and I my conclusion has to be that I don’t deserve the well-spokenness and the good manners. I bow to the ground, and apologise to all of you lovely publicists and theatre-makers. All that effort was completely wasted on me, and I’m very sorry.
Filed under personal …
Sometimes I want to turn this into a craft blog…
…and I wonder how far I could stretch the concept of guerrilla semiotics.
But no, seriously: I’ve spent the evening googling ‘effortless style’, doubtlessly the result of having slept only 3 hours last night, and of being a bit fatigued and under-dressed, in that academic way which unmistakably points out to 15,000-word projects and afternoons of interpretative phenomenology. I’ll be sounding like a broken record, but oh I’ll say it once again: I’m in thesis hell, health purgatory and have had a 12-hour fight with a Trojan on Tuesday. All my clothes are unwashed, I have had an unbroken spell of 3 months without cooking a meal, and bronchitis. I owe a number of reviews, all of very good shows, to a number of very good people, but oh there is the non-theatre side of life too, and it’s taken over.
What I’m about to reveal here, what only a few people have hitherto known (ie, Ian), is that I can run on Heidegger and Peggy Phelan for months, peut-etre, but every so often that lifestyle stops working for me, and then I go on stupid binges (ie, binges of stupid): playing Stardoll dress-ups, or scrolling up and down lookbook, or buying furniture. Also, more auspiciously, cooking or arranging flowers or hand-washing cashmere cardigans – these at least are calming activities. Which brings me to my point: this blog wouldn’t suffer so much neglect if I felt free to post the results of my dress-up games or pictures of my flower arrangements or, godforgive, cake. What if this specialisation was an over-, and a mistake?!
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One thing, for example, that I’ve been dying to share with the world in the most unashamedly bloggy way was my fight with my eating habits; they’re niche habits, so stay with me.
You see, despite being almost-Australian, I’ve spent all of my 5 years in this country trying to re-create some kind of Croatian eating routine. Now, we’re not a particularly foodie nation, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ‘Croatian food routine’ before I left the place. But oh there is!, and it is completely un-Australian. Where here one has a huge breakfast (allegedly; I’ve never seen a breakfast that wasn’t, deep inside, brunch), a sandwich for lunch, and then barely survives until the abundant 6 o’clock dinner, feeling guilty for wanting to snack in between (I know I’m caricaturing, but), in Croatia we eat the whole time. Croatian eating day consists of 5 meals: breakfast, snack, lunch, cake, dinner. The importance and time of each also differs: the eating peaks at lunch, around 1pm, and falls off on both ends. While breakfast can be anything, the 11am snack (which keeps you going until lunch) is usually a sandwich or spanakopita or donut or some such caloric thing. And cake, at 5 or 6pm, with coffee or tea, does half of the dinner’s job, leaving you with only small things to eat at 8pm – bread and cold meats, or soup.
Now, as a person who has never learned to eat breakfast, this worked very well for me, because I had plenty of opportunity to re-fuel, and lunch happened so soon anyway. But in Australia my eating routine immediately collapsed (this due to us Europeans being social eaters, unlike you funny Anglos – without company, I simply skipped all meals) into an unhealthy starving until 6pm, when I had to eat for the whole day, go to bed feeling unwell, and repeat. And imagine my confusion at the idea of having a sandwich (a snack in my books) have to stretch over a whole lunch! And at 12pm too, a time which was neither snack nor lunch, and which I was expected to do alone, in 30 minutes – very different from the big-deal-meal I was used to, with multiple courses and table conversation and plans for the afternoon (people don’t work afternoons in the post-socialist Europe).
I totally posted this, then I remembered that all craft blogs
have lots of pictures: hereby I attach an additional image of
cake. When I say ‘cake’, you see, I mean something as big
as 4 macarons, not some huge sticky date slice or one of
those atrocities called ‘mars bar cake’. Ew.
Anyway, earlier this year I’ve started having cake again. It just so happened. Around 5ish or 6ish, I’ve been finishing work and getting a biscuit or hedgehog slice or tartlet with tea, to re-fuel on my way to cooking dinner (this was before I went on cooking strike). And I’ve realised that cake is my favourite meal of the day. It makes perfect sense exactly where and how it is: you’ve already digested lunch, you’re a bit hungry and a bit tired, work is over, you need an indulgence, you may be doing all kinds of things in the evening, for which you need energy, but it’s not quite the time for a big meal. Ta-daan: have a hedgehog slice! Life immediately improves by a factor of 10.
So I started making time for the 5pm cake. It will sound terribly melodramatic when I say it changed my life, but, look: multi-tasking perfectionists like me spend not inconsiderable energy identifying habits that improve their well-being, and this was definitely one. My dinners became light and dispensable: I could eat before the theater, or after. I could graze on finger food for dinner, and it no longer mattered. I would wake up hungry, and so I started eating breakfast (or a snack, technically). Even lunches started happening, somehow! After 5 years of misery and undesired weight loss due to starvation, I could live happily again.
The only drawback is that this is all still hellishly difficult to explain to Australians. First, people think it’s immoral to plan to eat cake. Late at night, alone in the kitchen, stealthily, with much guilt, sure. But make a decision to eat cake every day! God forbid. So cake remains a lonely meal. The only equivalent after-work meal that Australians practice is called ‘beer’, but unfortunately there’s no way to reconcile cake and beer, not in Australia where establishments inevitably specialise in only one out of the two. And beer is much healthier (?).
Then, the whole business of eating so many times a day: certainly it’s fattening and unhealthy and spoils appetite. Yes, well, it does! That’s the point! It keeps you sated, but it also timetables what would otherwise be disorderly snacking. In 2006 or so, when I was googling food blogs, trying to figure out how to have lunch in Melbourne, I kept finding forums in which people discussed something called ‘4 o’clock slump‘. In my world, that’s your body telling you to finish work, sit down and have a slice of cake. In the world of Australian foodie blogs, ’4 o’clock slump’ was a chance to starve your body and then feel frustrated, but virtuous. It was not allowed to happen, and they were not going to feed it. Ah, but if you only have a sandwich for lunch..? What else are you going to feel at 4pm if not hunger?
But the rest has been reasonably OK. Big lunch, small dinner, and what I call a snack is generally nobody’s business. Being borderline underweight, people generally don’t give me shit for eating things they think are unhealthy (butter, bread, whatever). I have even come up with a working day that allows a big lunch, from 1 till 3 o’clock. It gives me an hour less to work, but I would have been slumping for an hour anyway…
I do find it remarkable, though, that something as simple as cake at 6pm can result in so much happiness, structure, and overall wellbeing. By which I mean, I’ve spent years trying to restructure my Australian daily life. It took an accident to realise that this one piece of cake was the key to it all.
Ahem, hello.
I was in Lisbon, Berlin and Zagreb this summer/winter; some horrible things happened in the family, and it was an animated trip, but not a nice one. I didn’t want to go: the only reason why I left was that a ticket had been booked, back at a time when I knew the reason why. When the time came to return to Australia, I didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t remember a single reason why I had ever wanted to live here. They are two different worlds, I suppose, the upsides of one incomparable with the downsides of the other.
Now I have an expensive haircut, and a beautiful boyfriend who plays French chançons in the morning, and treats me so well I have plenty of time to think about going back to Berlin, Zagreb, Lisbon. All the rest is as usual. Oh. And I won $20,000. C’est bon, c’est bon.
The year is over; long live 2009.
(Image courtesy of my beautiful, beautiful friend Vanda, at La Rondine.)
It’s not often that I inaugurate the end of something a whole month ahead, but this is going to be one such moment. As far as I’m concerned, we’re not in 2009 anymore.
This I mean more on personal, and less on theatrical terms – Dancehouse is still going strong with the most beautiful dance of the year, I have some coveted tickets for Meryl Tankard next week, and I am receiving orders for some tickets for Hayloft Project’s B.C. from as far as New York. No, the theatre is going strong. It’s just the life part of the year that has wrapped itself up.
I’ve written, by my conservative estimate, about 21,000 words in the last three weeks, on such topics as Sasha Waltz, literary pornography (to be distinguished from erotica), and development policy in Africa; with it, I’ve finished my degree, making me the first person in my family to get through the tunnel of tertiary education, and upward mobility personified. Big deal. Very big deal. I’ve had two days now, a whole weekend, of nothing but the laziest leisure, trying to make up for the last two-three months of work bordering on too hard, and two consecutive bouts of bronchitis that followed. It was useful fatigue; purging, necessary. Makes me wonder whether there are years abrasive enough to scrub the human being completely clean of the recent past, to speed up the natural regenerative process (by which, as Agnes Varda claims, at the end of every 8-year-period we are made of completely new cellular matter), to turn us into someone else. I live somewhere else, I look something else, I work somewhere else, my friends are other people and other people are my friends. I am going to Berlin soon; my heroes are new; I know things I didn’t know; I think differently. I am also, I hazard a guess, in love. Things are better than they have ever been; more importantly, things are good.
It has been a good year by any measure, but a tough one, in which the excitement of the good stuff only weighed heavier on the stress of the bad. A good year I wouldn’t wish on a dear friend. But, just like it sometimes happens that you wake up and realise some particular pain ceased a long time ago, so I woke up today and noticed that things have been nothing but bright and easy for what seems like a long time. And that, furthermore, they are unlikely to get anything else for as far into the future as the eye can see.
Recently, while packing/unpacking, I discovered I have been carrying a love letter in my wallet for a couple of year, oblivious to its explosive potential. It was folded, an address scribbled over, and it did not occur to me that inside was a declaration of bright hopes for the future, and some small sentimental melodrama. It was a good letter, a persuasive one, and had I read it at some other point in my life it would have probably made me very sad: all the squandered good intentions, you see. But something has changed (what with the hazardously-guessed falling in love), and I’ve become more aware of how much we make our own lives: in that list of future directions, all enticing and all impossible (I haven’t seen that person for so long I can barely picture him in my mind), I could now see my own future directions, which the writer of the letter was strangely parroting back to me. Or, perhaps more accurately, something that was always more mine than his, something returned back to its rightful owner. I stuck it on some fairly public wall, to keep me alert.
There will be, in the days to come, a lot of writing here. I have lots and lots and lots of notes to get out of my head, and GS has been undeservedly neglected of late. Before Christmas with my sister and new year in Lisbon and revisiting the performative turn in geography, and clothes-shopping and macaroons with girls and shopping at Ikea.
For weeks now, I’ve been living on a strange diet of persian feta on bread, occasionally broken by fine dining. I got up at 4pm, and Melbourne was bright and sunshiny, with people eating ice-cream on the street. It’s raining now, that funny sort of summer rain, and the window is open to let the cool air in. I am thinking pastel thoughts.