Stupid
Oh Sarrie. Stupid is the word. You feel stupid this morning, don’t you? Stupid and hungover. Just promise me this: remember this feeling next time you get drunk and decide, somewhere along the way, that something is a red hot goer when it clearly isn’t. Just think a little next time, okay?
This is my last weekend in Melbourne, and I had planned to rise early, head into the city and do some Christmas shopping. Just walk around and feel it, you know? Instead, I stumbled into bed at around 5am (stupid!), woke late and went to the gym. What, is that so crazy? Maybe so, but I’ll tell you this: if you can drag your lazy arse out of bed and transcend the vommy feeling, the gym is about the best way I know of feeling normal once again. That and all the other things I did today- drank coffee, read the papers, dissected the previous night’s events in minute detail, voiced the findings to a close friend, took a nap, sat around reliving the worst moments, etc etc. Some people might say that I achieved more today than the average person on a morning-after-type Saturday. To them I say get fucked: I had plans, you know, and nothing got done!
Anyway, two things. First, all those ridiculous horror stories about teeth turned out to be just that: ridiculous. Apart from a mouth full of blood for several hours, which, unbeknownst to me, trickled amusingly down my chin completely unchecked because my whole face was too numb to feel it, I was a-ok. Mind you, I did take a bit of a tumble in the bathroom the next morning. “Down she goes!” I thought as I hit the floor, fully conscious. I put that down to a lack of food, and the Panadine Forte the dentist prescribed for the pain. What can I say? C’est fort!
The other thing is time. And how I’m desperately trying to hold onto my last days here, and have something distilled to take away with me. It’s futile, of course. Time is just trickling through my fingers and I can’t do anything to slow it down. I’m someone who has always tried to use every hour of my day productively. But I also spend so much time examining and analysing my every thought, feeling or action that sometimes I worry that I’m forgetting to have fun.
My point is that Laos will be a whole other ball game. Time is a completely different concept there. It’s cyclical, and not a commodity. I won’t be able to measure my days, hours, achievements, all-round progress, in quite the obsessive way I do now. Usually, the thought of this fills my heart with fear, but lately, the notion is sort of appealing. I do worry, though, that I will come back the sort of person that usually enrages me.
I went to a French school when I was a child and a teenager. I, along with my oldest friends Cristy and Rhyl and a bunch of other people whom I haven’t seen in years (but whose faces, frozen in childhood, I can still remember), grew up bilingual, and probably never gave it much thought. We took most of our classes in French, but nothing seems that weird when you’re a kid. In my late teens, when I spent some time in France, I learnt to appreciate my language skill more. In particular, I was always proud of my accent, which was 100% Parisien. Mais bien sur: we were taught mostly by young French men who were doing their Foreign Service instead of Military Service, which was still compulsory in France back then. As a result, when I was actually in France, I was always told that my accent contained barely a trace of Aussie.
But then I spent 2000-2001 studying in Montreal, and somewhere along the way acquired a thick streak of Quebecois in my accent. It came, most likely, from my obsession with accents in general, and my constant attempts to emulate the peasanty Quebec twang.
I didn’t realise it had stuck until last night, when I was in a flower shop, chatting to the French guy who was helping me pick out roses. He asked me if I was from Quebec. Mortifying.
My point is that, while I might come back from Laos a more relaxed, well-rounded individual, with more realistic expectations of myself and what I can achieve in a day, I hope to God I don’t acquire along the way a nasty streak of nihilism that will take me years of conscious effort to shake off! Like the weird, Montreal vowels, it could haunt me- an indelible stamp of who I am and where I’ve been!!
You see? Worrying, all the time. And I’ll tell you another thing that worries me: I will never, ever be able to listen to Tori Amos in quite the same way again. The girl next door plays it whenever she has sex (quite often). But poor Tori, I know she’s got a pair of lungs on her, but she is powerless to drown out the moaning.
Right, I’m off. I bought tickets to see Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks positively months ago, and the night has arrived. Of course, I could not have known, when purchasing said tickets, that I would end up having to go all haunted and mortified from the night before. But I’m putting on a brave face: I’ve changed into a particularly “Melbourne” outfit and put on some makeup. Ironic, because I love Stephen Malkmus precisely because he takes me back to my early uni days, when I wore sneakers and a backpack and listened to Pavement on my walkman. An indie-rock nerd!
Deep down I’m still the same.
This is my last weekend in Melbourne, and I had planned to rise early, head into the city and do some Christmas shopping. Just walk around and feel it, you know? Instead, I stumbled into bed at around 5am (stupid!), woke late and went to the gym. What, is that so crazy? Maybe so, but I’ll tell you this: if you can drag your lazy arse out of bed and transcend the vommy feeling, the gym is about the best way I know of feeling normal once again. That and all the other things I did today- drank coffee, read the papers, dissected the previous night’s events in minute detail, voiced the findings to a close friend, took a nap, sat around reliving the worst moments, etc etc. Some people might say that I achieved more today than the average person on a morning-after-type Saturday. To them I say get fucked: I had plans, you know, and nothing got done!
Anyway, two things. First, all those ridiculous horror stories about teeth turned out to be just that: ridiculous. Apart from a mouth full of blood for several hours, which, unbeknownst to me, trickled amusingly down my chin completely unchecked because my whole face was too numb to feel it, I was a-ok. Mind you, I did take a bit of a tumble in the bathroom the next morning. “Down she goes!” I thought as I hit the floor, fully conscious. I put that down to a lack of food, and the Panadine Forte the dentist prescribed for the pain. What can I say? C’est fort!
The other thing is time. And how I’m desperately trying to hold onto my last days here, and have something distilled to take away with me. It’s futile, of course. Time is just trickling through my fingers and I can’t do anything to slow it down. I’m someone who has always tried to use every hour of my day productively. But I also spend so much time examining and analysing my every thought, feeling or action that sometimes I worry that I’m forgetting to have fun.
My point is that Laos will be a whole other ball game. Time is a completely different concept there. It’s cyclical, and not a commodity. I won’t be able to measure my days, hours, achievements, all-round progress, in quite the obsessive way I do now. Usually, the thought of this fills my heart with fear, but lately, the notion is sort of appealing. I do worry, though, that I will come back the sort of person that usually enrages me.
I went to a French school when I was a child and a teenager. I, along with my oldest friends Cristy and Rhyl and a bunch of other people whom I haven’t seen in years (but whose faces, frozen in childhood, I can still remember), grew up bilingual, and probably never gave it much thought. We took most of our classes in French, but nothing seems that weird when you’re a kid. In my late teens, when I spent some time in France, I learnt to appreciate my language skill more. In particular, I was always proud of my accent, which was 100% Parisien. Mais bien sur: we were taught mostly by young French men who were doing their Foreign Service instead of Military Service, which was still compulsory in France back then. As a result, when I was actually in France, I was always told that my accent contained barely a trace of Aussie.
But then I spent 2000-2001 studying in Montreal, and somewhere along the way acquired a thick streak of Quebecois in my accent. It came, most likely, from my obsession with accents in general, and my constant attempts to emulate the peasanty Quebec twang.
I didn’t realise it had stuck until last night, when I was in a flower shop, chatting to the French guy who was helping me pick out roses. He asked me if I was from Quebec. Mortifying.
My point is that, while I might come back from Laos a more relaxed, well-rounded individual, with more realistic expectations of myself and what I can achieve in a day, I hope to God I don’t acquire along the way a nasty streak of nihilism that will take me years of conscious effort to shake off! Like the weird, Montreal vowels, it could haunt me- an indelible stamp of who I am and where I’ve been!!
You see? Worrying, all the time. And I’ll tell you another thing that worries me: I will never, ever be able to listen to Tori Amos in quite the same way again. The girl next door plays it whenever she has sex (quite often). But poor Tori, I know she’s got a pair of lungs on her, but she is powerless to drown out the moaning.
Right, I’m off. I bought tickets to see Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks positively months ago, and the night has arrived. Of course, I could not have known, when purchasing said tickets, that I would end up having to go all haunted and mortified from the night before. But I’m putting on a brave face: I’ve changed into a particularly “Melbourne” outfit and put on some makeup. Ironic, because I love Stephen Malkmus precisely because he takes me back to my early uni days, when I wore sneakers and a backpack and listened to Pavement on my walkman. An indie-rock nerd!
Deep down I’m still the same.
posted by sarrie24 | 1:14 PM
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