Learning The Hard Way

Status update – from go to woe

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Learning the hard way

Welcome to the world and welcome to Facebook where your entire life from zygote to delivery has been assiduously documented.

People! Enough with the flash!

From the remarkable 4D scan (ok, about that…forgive me if I’m a tad cynical about the actual geometric possibilities of 4D, but as a marketing ploy it’s a touch of genius) and your mother’s 2am status updates –

Craving fruit loops and peanut butter. Is that normal or just plain loopy. Lol

ROFL

– to photos uploaded mere moments after birth, all swaddled and red faced, your digital scrapbook begins.

Bless you if you’re not utterly inured to flash photography at roughly the two hour mark when doting grandparents and excitable aunties have steamed in with smart phones at the ready.

#mygorgeousneice#howcuteisshe#proudestAuntyeva#

Your Instagram presence begins with a delightfully blurred Amaro effect and immediately garners 150 likes. How’s that for instant popularity?

Your social media persona will be stage managed from here on by mum and dad who will probably post a succession of your images as their own Facebook avatars, before you eventually assume self-regulation sometime around twelve years of age.

status – It’s complicated

Look, they’re obviously proud and excited and they just want to share the story of their lives which now includes you. Of course the flip side to this is that, in your case, this public narrative is being recorded before you actually decide to participate in it. Not that you’d object now, for those cute photos of you in the bath or dressed in a batman cape, gum boots and nothing else are too gorgeous not to share, right?

Then where’s it go?

And yes, somewhat confusingly, while on one hand your parents are stressing the stranger danger message to you, they are also happy to post pictures of you at the school sports carnival with the name of the school proudly emblazoned across your sports top.

Never before have parents been able to cast such a wide net in sharing the specifics of their children’s lives. This unilateral deluge of information may not embarrass you as a small child, but you may not be so impressed when you reach the pre-teen stage.

You may have friends whose parents are obsessed with elevating everything their own children ever do to genius status. These parents will post endless photos of grimly smiling kids lining up regimentally to display the latest sporting medals. These people will illicit feelings of inadequacy and failure amongst other parents and children alike. Feel free to openly disparage them in the name of social balance.

When you do eventually take over your on-line presence, the overarching message from your parents will be quite clear – posting pictures of yourself and sharing every detail of your life is entirely normal in a world where being private seems to have lost its currency.

Now you have assumed custody you will have your peers dictating both the flow of information and the volume of images presented to the world. All this at a time when you are conflicted by the public and the private – a time of great personal mystery and revelation conflated with a culture of necessary over sharing. Just quietly – it’s kind of nuts.

You may also find yourself Facebook friends with your parents and more oddly, the parents of your friends. See, way back when, if a parent of a friend sent you a letter, or telephoned you it would have seemed kind of weird, now its perfectly acceptable to friend request the classroom and regale them with status updates about the disintegration of your marriage or the delights of your Thermomix.

There will, back to you, be mistakes, there will be mortification and there will be regret. There will not, however, be a facility to eradicate any of those. Which leads me to the issue of constructing the narrative that truly reflects who you are.

For back in the dark ages when I was at school, it was entirely possible to be characterized as a complete bitch, devout nerd, serial pest, utter dork or overachiever throughout your entire school years, then leave , reinvent yourself and present at your ten year reunion as a completely altered human being. Eventually the memories of your fellow alumni faded along with any rogue residual instamatic photographs.

Gone. Never happened. This is who I am.

Today your images and status updates– the good, the bad and the ugly or the pumped, dumped or drunk are there

LIKE FOREVAH! OMFG LOL 😉

There’s no escape. You can run, but you can’t hide.

Culling your Facebook friends, forgoing Instagram, ignoring Linkedin requests will create some distance, but it’s entirely possible that eventually the stuff you are least proud of will resurface and unlike a dopey full sleeve tattoo it can’t be lasered away.

Posted in humor | Tagged children, facebook, family, instagram, Linkedin, Parent, Photograph, Social media, Social network, Stranger danger | 8 Comments

Ageing Beauty

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Learning the hard way

So there I was swathed in capes and towels contemplating the furrow of lurex threads adorning my part line and wondering when my regrowth touchups went from every three months to every five weeks, when a magazine cover caught my eye.

Beauty At Any Age – Our Annual Ageing Issue.

Well that’s jolly timely, I thought.

I also thought that it’s time I remained loyal to one hairdresser instead of moving on as frequently as The Big Issue vendor outside North Melbourne IGA gets muscled out and replaced by increasingly aggressive magazine sellers.

You know the ones? You courteously decline their whiny imploration to buy the latest copy because, in my case, I have one particular homeless person I freely admit to favouring over the others, and instead of a bit of banter about ‘maybe next time’, you cop an earful of abuse! Whoa, easy, mate.

Where was I? Oh yes, salon disloyalty. I don’t mean to be a hair whore. My intentions are almost always honorable in the beginning, but something inevitably conspires to send me elsewhere.

It all started with Larry who had a salon across the road from my first job.

…cue 80’s soundtrack and spiral perm…

I spent an inordinate amount of time and money regularly altering the colour and style of my drab locks in a fruitless bid to alleviate the stultifying boredom of life as a dental assistant. Encouraged by my capricious approach to hair colour, he talked me into modeling for him at a hair show.

This involved stripping the hair of all pigments, which turned it the colour, and texture of wheat husks. Then he dyed it orange.

Ronald McDonald orange.

Styled in a complicated arrangement of whorls and waves and lacquered to immovability, I was then subjected to the cosmetic ministrations of a make up artist who appeared to take her inspiration from Picasso’s Weeping Woman. My face was daubed in ochreous foundation and iridescent green eyeshadow. It wasn’t my best look.

After the show, Larry, clearly heady from the thrill of competition, and by way of thanking me, went for the inappropriate tongue pash. Given the man was as camp as a row of tents and bore more than a passing resemblance to Leo Sayer, I was neither anticipating nor desirous of this lingual overture.

The next few salons were a random mix of referrals from well coiffed colleagues and saw me sporting a range of celebrity looks – from the Annie Lennox ‘Sweet Dreams’ crop through to Gwyneth Paltrow’s, ‘Sliding Doors’ modified pixie cut. I would move on when the price exceeded the weekly grocery bill and my ex-husband discovered credit card receipts.

There was nothing at all wrong with the last one (and I was inordinately fond of my stylist) except the geographical distance and, ok; it was a tad on the pricey side. But that’s what you get in certain well-heeled suburbs where the clients are all discussing culinary tours of Tuscany and skiing at Whistler. This is also the salon most likely to receive requests for the ‘Thatcher’.

Yes, it’s true, the most requested celebrity hairstyle since Jennifer Anniston’s shag, is an homage to the recently departed Baroness. With the assistance of a tail comb and industrial quantities of Elnett, it’s relatively easy to bash into shape and gives one a look of authority without sacrificing femininity.

I sat there waiting for my stylist, Elvira, ruefully examining evidence of tonsorial aging at yet another new salon in my ‘hood and being quietly mocked by Diane Kruger smiling up from the cover of the magazine, all unlined and glamorous, the Beauty At Any Age banner running across her taut thighs.

Bitch.

Heading straight for the skin care section I discovered now was the time to incorporate retinoic acid, peptides and a good resurfacing elixir – which rather makes me feel like a worn out bathtub. I should also consider incorporating green tea, rosehip oil, sausage tree extract (I know…what???), quince and mangosteen into my beauty regime. To ingest or anoint is not made clear.

Failing to eradicate any rogue frown lines there is always the poor woman’s botox – a fringe. Which brings me back to hair. Elvira and I agree going lighter might assist with camouflage, staving off a fresh chemical onslaught for at least a couple of weeks longer, a tenet corroborated by the authoritative manual I was poring over.

The supplement section validated my current pill popping tendencies. Because many women here are observing the sun smart message and avoiding sunlight like Bella in Breaking Dawn, we take Vitamin D and calcium. This, of course, is because the consequence of teenage summers slathered in baby oil and baking for hours in macramé bikinis while drinking Big Banana M and listening to Cold Chisel, is skin like a crocodile and melanoma.

Finally there was the fashion advice. I have reached the age where I should be brave about this and embrace unconventional shapes – I can’t help wondering, as I note the impossibility of well fitting jeans, if fashion pundits might not be tacitly implying I simply give up and embrace the poncho?

I’ve noted the tendency of your mature woman to up the ante with chunky resin jewellery and theatrically draped pashminas. Bio mum and her conjoined sister follow this trend, sporting matching fringed scarves, outrageous earrings and armfuls of bangles. If Andre Rieu is their celebrity crush, Iris Apfel is their poster girl.

The old edict of less is more seems not to apply to this demographic; it’s as if they are collectively cocking a snoot at society, saying, ‘You think I’m invisible? Think again!’

I leave the salon, heartened by Naomi Wolfe’s article asserting that truly charismatic women have lived long enough to be interesting and that the conventional societal notion of beauty is ephemeral at best.

But far more importantly, my hair looks great.

Posted in humor | Tagged ageing, Big Issue, Diane Kruger, fashion, green eyeshadow, hair, humor, Iris Apfel, north melbourne, skin care, spiral perm, style | 11 Comments

Not a brainiac.

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Learning the hard way

I took my second Lumosity research study assessment yesterday and despite almost daily training sessions it appears I am a moron…

…seriously dense

….really quite the dunce.

It’s chiefly the areas of problem solving and attention that seem to be letting me down.

Although I can, as of this afternoon, add depth perception and perspective. I have replaced a large sauté pan permanently maimed over the weekend with a maple syrup marinade of such flammability as to indelibly remain on its non-stick lifetime guaranteed surface. The new one, a good third bigger than its predecessor, has a surface that almost entirely engulfs the hot plate and is too large to store anywhere.

Idiot.

But truthfully I need look no farther than the bloggers I follow to crush any intellectual self-esteem. There in my email in-box pop the prolific offerings of bloggers from around the world. Many of them are witty, erudite folk delivering beautifully crafted blog posts that make me laugh out loud or shed the occasional tear. Their insight and wisdom are a joy to behold.

Then there are the frequently mediocre posts from banal ranters whose stock in trade are cat memes, acronyms and profanity. They invariably and inexplicably, have many hundreds of followers, giving me the intestinal fortitude to continue myself for there is clearly a reader for every blog.

Where was I? Oh that’s right, not so smart.

This has actually been confirmed on a number of previous occasions. Just before wrapping up life as a franchisee for a failing women’s gym (Change Stations Now), I took up the offer of psych profiling from one of the few remaining members.

It was a CPI Profile and involved pages of multiple-choice questions. I may have elicited the long held ‘if in doubt, go with C’ rule towards the end because it was all becoming a little repetitive and I was bored.

According to Harrison G. Gough Ph.D , the results placed me in the Gamma quadrant. I felt as though I should have a shiny silver jumpsuit and a secret handshake. We Gamma types, defined by below average scores on Vector 1 and 2 which may or may not have been space stations, I didn’t ask, tend to be involved, participative and rule questioning. I quite liked that. I also liked that in the empathy section I ranked right up and over the standard norm.

See? I understand how people are feeling. That would be perfect for a career in a funeral home wouldn’t it?

The psychologist gym member looked at me doubtfully as I continued,

…or I could become a psychologist… YES! FINALLY! some serious scientific Gamma based career direction!

Quietly drawing my attention back to the report she pointed out that my above average empathy appeared to be countered by a subterranean ranking in the tolerance section.

So, Mrs. Jones, this is your second visit to me now and while I completely understand how devastating this whole incident of infidelity has been for you I’m frankly just a little bit tired of your inability to employ any of the strategies we discussed. I mean seriously, you really need to help yourself here and stop being a doormat.

So the search for a job that incorporates my openness to new experience and freedom from inhibition along with an impatient and impractical bent continues.

I’d almost certainly make a superlative billionaire.

But until then, I must regenerate some brain cells before I start repeating myself. I’d almost certainly make a superlative billionaire.

I discovered the Freerice website over the weekend and have been whizzing through the vocabulary levels like a creature possessed. Freerice is run by the United Nations World Food programme and it’s not-for-profit website affords free education to anyone with access to a computer and free rice to third world communities. They donate ten grains of rice for every correct answer so it’s not very helpful to remain stuck on level one if you are at all concerned about world hunger.

Rapidly progressing through to level 45 where knowing the meaning of words like capstone, ventricose and stertor (words that the Apple spell checker deem unrecognisable ) not only make me feel learned but ensure goodly donations of oryza glaberrima.

As you can see, it’s quite obviously working.

Dumb arse!

Posted in humor | Tagged Freerice, humor, Lumosity, problem solving, psychological testing, vocabulary | 10 Comments

Game of shut up!

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Learning the hard way

They’re at it again. A thumping piano and a swelling chorus of voices punctuated by an intermittent baritone. For several months now there have been daily rehearsals. When the roller door at the back of their warehouse is open an operatic soundscape fills our street.

It’s kind of annoying.

Since we moved here the theatre company next door had been conspicuously quiet. In fact, there was a time when I wondered if they were still operating. The occasional truck would pull up at the roller door and unload materials, the door would close and that was the end of it. I was watching a lot of Breaking Bad and quietly suspected they were cooking meth.

Then last year during one or other of the relentless festivals hosted by our determinedly cultural city, the roller doors of both the warehouse next door and one recently vacated across the road became a hive of 24hour set building activity.

The sound of nail guns and power saws rent the air while paint fumes permeated every open window. Fortunately it ended as emphatically as it began and several weeks later the last of whatever they had been constructing vanished into the night.

But now they are back with a vengeance. With rehearsals for what I can only assume to be something Wagnerian in scale laboring throughout the day and set construction literally banging on into the night, my occasional good humour has been sorely tested.

One night last week spouse and I were a little fractious – his excuse was plain exhaustion due to overwork while, unsurprisingly to anyone who has been following my blog, this is my natural state. The sounds from next door were amplified by a particularly still night.

In what can only be considered a stroke of pure genius, I decided to inculcate my husband into the undeniable thrall of Game of Thrones.

Stay with me here.

On the eve of season three commencing it was imperative to hook him as quickly as possible, so we’d been watching back-to-back episodes. Far from being a cerebral psychological thriller filled with ominous silences and whispered threats, Game Of Thrones is a riot of noise. A veritable wall of sound accompanies the visceral images of blood, guts and, for the romantics, frequent nudity.

Brilliantly, the clanging of sheet metal from the theatre crew melded seamlessly into a tournament at King’s Landing. The mezzo-soprano’s trilling aria overlaid perfectly into the frequent scenes of torture and when the chorus really wound up a Northern battle could absorb them completely.

But eventually even the prospect of Joffrey being slapped again,

couldn’t prevent the siren call of bedtime. Lulled into a false sense of security by a fleeting tea break, it wasn’t long before our ears were once again assailed by the neighbour’s nocturnal industry.

Spouse wandered down and had a quiet word. Apparently they were nearly done. An hour later and sheer fatigue had claimed him. Snoring like a freight train beside me I contemplated the various ways I could deal with the resultant stereo noise pollution.

They all involved blunt instruments.

See how suggestible I am? If I’d been watching Mad Men I would have just resorted to a cut crystal glass of scotch and some seconals.

Instead I waited until nigh on midnight to leap from the bed and fling on an odd assortment of layered black clothing. I snatched up my keys and an umbrella and strode outside. Ducking under the half opened roller door I stormed into the open space and confronted my operatic tormenters.

“So I’m guessing you’re all working to some kind of performance deadline here?” I said, my voice a little higher than usual.

Two women kneeling with paintbrushes in hand looked up at me blankly.

I persisted.

“A fairly elastic deadline wouldn’t you say, given you have been doing this for WEEKS?” My voice has risen further and I gesticulated more than was strictly necessary for emphasis.

“You do understand this is a residential area and most of us have to get up and actually work in the morning?” I was snarky now.

A heavily bearded man on a ladder punctuated my sentence with some spirited hammering.

“Look, don’t get me wrong. I love the theatre, I really do. Did a stint of amateur stuff myself way back…

(Oh god, this is going to get her blogging about the lost thespian opportunities of her youth, spare us! See how I can jump straight into your thoughts? Prepare yourselves)

…and I understand the processes, but seriously, this can’t possibly wait until morning?”

Even though an attempt at a placatory tack may have lost some of its empathy here due to my gritted teeth delivery, by now it was obvious none of these smarmy creative types gave a toss about neighbourhood peace.

Wrapping my black micro modal layers about myself I stood before them like a Guard of the Night’s Watch and leveled a gimlet eye, “Right then,” I fumed ominously, brandishing my umbrella like valerian steel, “ in three minutes it will be midnight and it will be time to wrap up this gesamtkunstwerk for the day. Ja?”

Seven people nodded uncertainly at me.

“Ok then. Good. Yes, well thanks for that and good luck with everything”. I walked back towards the door.

“I’m sure it will be a truly stunning production…eventually. Chookas! ( I told you I’d dabbled in the theatre)”

I popped my head back in from outside and catching the eye of beardy on the ladder called out, “Break a leg!” He had the good sense to look anxious.

Three minutes later the roller door shut and several cars accelerated into the night.

“Where were you?” muttered spouse half asleep.

“Just chatting with the neighbours. Go back to sleep.”

Posted in humor | Tagged Game of Thrones, humor, opera, rehearsals, set construction, theater | 2 Comments

The knead to relax.

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Learning the hard way

My relationship with all forms of beauty therapy is fraught at best. In the interest of background research please now refer to last years blog post, ‘The Spa Treatment’, for further insight into the vagaries of salons… and Croatians.

For those of you privy to this particular diatribe – comic and tragic in equal measure – feel free to make a cup of tea while we wait for everyone else to catch up.

Really, we’ll wait for you. Oh come on, it’s easy. Just go to the back catalogue listed to the right of this article. Got it? Now, it’s the eighth one – in between ‘Holidays’ and ‘Turning of the Stone’; both riveting and cautionary posts that in many ways should be required reading for anyone looking to travel with a new partner. Seriously.

Off you go!

Welcome back and how much of a revelation was that? You will never look at your toenails the same way again.

Last week I found myself looking for something to kill the ineffable boredom I was experiencing on the Gold Coast before my escape flight home to significantly cooler (in every sense of the word) Melbourne.

The Gold Coast, for those of you who don’t leave your own country or watch travelogues, is a coastal city in the South East of Queensland – Australia’s redneck state. It is characterized by gorgeous swathes of beach fringed with apartment blocks and skyscrapers and drunken louts who occasionally harass street performers.

I joined other wholesalers to pander to the 100 or so members of a large jewellery buying group gathered at Palazzo Versace – that overwrought Italianate resort hotel favoured by cashed up bogans.

“Look darl, you can buy the bath robes. We can knock off one and buy the other. I reckon that’s fair.”

These buying days are unequivocal failures and I have no idea why we keep attending them. I’m bored even talking about it.

The upshot of our inability to engender the slightest bit of retail interest was that we agreed to pack up a day early and get the hell out of Dodge.

My boss was able to change his flight – I was not.

I managed an hour or so of esplanade wandering until it became congested with joggers and I was nearly collected by a careening skateboarder.

The Cavill Avenue Mall offered no vengeance seeking buskers to amuse, so I went in search of a nail bar. Generally when I decide a manicure is in order, I am in a rush to be somewhere else and invariably bolt out the door before the varnish is completely dry. My $30 manicure resembles the artwork of a four year old with advanced fine motor skills before I have even left the carpark.

Not so this day. I had hours for a French manicure to dry uninterrupted to glossy perfection.

Wandering into a dark arcade I found Karysma’s beauty salon where I had the pleasure of meeting Kirraleigh, my teen nail technician. Kirraleigh had a flawlessly burnished tan and hair the colour and texture of bleached driftwood.

The downside of a manicure is that unlike a facial, you can’t really close your eyes and pretend to be asleep. Sitting upright with your arms extended across the table you appear more than open to communication.

I wasn’t.

Kirraleigh was oblivious to my monosyllabic responses and maintained a steady stream of questions for the entire 90 minutes of nail ministering. Eventually I just let her answer for me.

Sitting at the airport several hours later I observed that the white tips of my French polished nails had developed the crazed appearance of excavated ceramic urns while the nail on my right index finger, having been filed to translucency, sheared off completely.

A day later spouse and I hit the day spa of a Yarra Valley resort we had booked for our anniversary (First year down, so far, so good). He had been a spa virgin when first we met and like a great many ‘real men’, shied away from anything to do with detoxifying masques and essential oils.

But bless him if he doesn’t just love them now. See what can be achieved in four years?

I found him sitting sheepishly in the waiting room wearing the one-size-fits-no-one towelling robe, all bare elbows and knees. Tripping on my scuffs I joined him to wait for our therapists.

Donna and Julie, having drawn straws to see who got the 6foot 2 hairy one (that’s not me…), eventually led us to our treatment room and instructed us to disrobe and put on disposable g-strings.

Despite our close proximity both therapists spoke to us individually, echoing each other’s exact phrases with a time delay of ten seconds. I imagine this is what life in the maximum security twilight home may eventually be like.

What I would give to be able to share the sight of my husband in his teeny paper g-string.

‘This can’t be right?” he observed checking himself in the mirror. Certainly there was very little left to the imagination.

For the next 30 minutes we were oiled and scrubbed like a couple of baked potatoes. The sound of sloughing skin cells and the occasional wince filled the room.

We were to spend the next half an hour soaking in a romantic spa bath. Donna and Julie deposited a platter of chocolate dipped strawberries and honeycomb on the steps of the spa and discretely took their leave.

Possibly as a result of the oil and salt crust covering my body like a channel swimmer, I failed to register the water temperature until well through the floating carpet of rose petals. Had Donna and Julie lingered outside the door they may well have misunderstood the ensuing gasps, pants and squeals for some waterborne sexual congress.

Instead, I had leapt up onto the candle covered edge and crouched Golum like as spouse frantically ran the cold tap into the brimming tub. Clearly the oil needed to boil off. Some twenty minutes later we managed to lower our respective haunches all the way in and could enjoy a waterlogged strawberry.

Faint from the heat, we eventually staggered out and spent the remaining five minutes picking rose petals off our beet red skin.

Donna and Julie returned for the relaxation massage and scalp treatment. The sounds of a native Australian bush CD filled the room as both women got to work on our lightly poached bodies.

A Wurundjeri woman told a story in her native tongue, I think it might have been about a bunyip with catarrh or maybe the destruction of a forest by chainsaw wielding loggers until I realized that joining the chorus of corellas, kookaburras and magpies, was my husbands violently vibrating uvula.

For the love of god, will one of you hit him!

Afterwards, as we sipped on our restorative herbal tea, he claimed to have no recollection of the actual massage. Seriously? Donna could have just sprayed him with some lemon myrtle oil, chucked some rocks along his spine and left him to sleep instead of busting a gut kneading his somnambulant form for an hour.

Well that’s what I would have done.

Posted in humor, Travel | Tagged anniversary, australia, busker, Gold Coast, humor, husband, Manicure, massage, Nailpolish, spa, Yarra Valley | 7 Comments

Dude, where’s my service?

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Learning the hard way

Years ago in a fresher time I’d hear women complain about feeling invisible and figured it was because of their obvious facial hair or general air of disintegration.

Darl, I thought, it’s time to embrace laser hair removal and lose the defeatist attitude.

Don’t get me wrong; I too have periodically disappeared. Before the first born, I would confidently stride through department stores in my lunch break commanding attendance via a complex circuit of electro magnetic force. This was generated by a combination of enormous self-regard and a polyester viscose power suit.

Out of my way elderly person with no life to speak of, for the love of Dynasty I am in dire need of skin serum redolent with fletan oil and allantoin lest my unlined dermis become as etched and desiccated as yours. *shudder.

Flourishing my wallet and looking impatiently at my watch – tick tock, tick tock – I would be served immediately and deferentially.

Post infant I crept into the same department stores wearing the harried and bewildered expression of a supremely unprepared first time mother. Clad in stretch pants and voluminous top I would wheel the pram over to the beauty counter and feel just like an eight year old; too short to be spotted and too insignificant to serve.

Invisible.

Fortunately my stock increased again when teenaged daughters and a store card accompanied me on shopping expeditions; another brief and powerful time in the retail sun.

So today, I needed to get the Apple TV doohickey fixed –

Doohickey? Where’d that come from? Obviously I meant to say thingamajig or thingamabob.

I began my quest for iService at the fashion capital. A line of apple staff-slash-bouncers lined the store frontage and I assumed my ‘assistance required now’ countenance.

Not entirely quick enough for mine, a young chap (for aren’t they all?) posed the inevitable, ‘can I help you?’ in a decidedly desultory manner.

My witty banter and winning ways were met with clinical detachment and far from solving the issue for me – as the on-line forum for bitching about Apple products had foreshadowed – he whipped out his iPad and made an appointment for me to see a technician in 5 days time. Not five minutes or a coffee/lunch/maybe some actual work five hours time – FIVE DAYS.

No! Really?

He was unmoved.

Yeah, really.

I went to another centre where the store was buzzing with energy. Dozens of blue polo shirt wearing Apple evangelists scurried about radiating geek in the way only dreamed about by the spotty Dungeons & Dragons loving boys of my youth. Ah yes, the days of a 4.77 Mega Hertz with 4 bit processor and a whole 2k of RAM – heady stuff, but not remotely attractive.

Explaining my Apple TV issue I was designated a time with a technician for some twenty minutes later. I wandered off to simulate work and grab a smoothie, popping back at the appointed time.

Propped up at the Genius Bar I waited for one of the Apple chaps to investigate my problem.

Waiting.

There was a lot of tough ass tech talk flying around me and every one of the diagnostic masters appeared to be called ‘dude.’

Waiting.

A tandoori blonde with sea anemone eyelashes and a cavernous cleavage appeared between me and another Apple day patient at the Genius Bar. Dudes from everywhere converged around her flexing their I.T muscles.

Apparently the team had been able to restore all her laptop settings and just needed to recover her photos. How long was it going to take to reinstate 30,000 selfies?

Waiting.

By now it was some thirty minutes of finger drumming and arranging my face from beguiling to infuriated; no amount of throat clearing and excuse me’s were effective in drawing attention to myself. I was invisible.

Eventually I slid off the stool and approached one of the green iPad bearing check in dudes. It only took one chinese burn and a head lock for him to acknowledge my vaguely hyperventilating presence and apologise.

I don’t know what happened. We’ll look at that right now. Dude! Help this lady!

Dude looked around. Green iPad pointed at me.

Oh, I’m so sorry Ma’am, I didn’t see you there. Have you been waiting long?

I didn’t trust myself to speak.

Posted in humor | Tagged ageing, Apple, Apple Store, department stores, Genius Bar, humor, iPad, moisturiser, power suits, service | 9 Comments

The Dinner Party

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Learning the hard way

I’m not a great cook, but I love to eat and I know with absolute certainty that the tripe, smoked cod and lumpy, grey mashed potatoes I had the misfortune of growing up with are fit for no-one but the most hardened recidivistic prisoners.

Let’s assume that my taste buds got off to a less than inspiring start.

My ex-husband (EH) was seven years older than me and when we met he already had a number of sophisticated married friends. We would enjoy enthusiastic dinner parties from young women keen to trial their bridal Le Creuset casserole and sporks.

After several years of free loading, it was suggested we might like to return the favour. EH was happy to endorse my novice cooking skills and made a date for our first dinner party.

He lived in a cramped one bedroom flat with a Spartan kitchen. The upright stove was more frequently used for storage than cooking and with the exception of a vegetable peeler and spatula, there was little else to suggest a functional kitchen.

So I raided my stepmothers cook books, quietly wondering if they were pointed gifts from people familiar with her particular style of food mutation, and set about planning three courses of fabulousness.

I found a recipe for individual salmon mousse that could be whipped up and refrigerated the day before. This proved startlingly easy and I really didn’t know what all the fuss was about.

With my newfound culinary cockiness, I settled on trout almondine with a green salad and baked potatoes for main course.

Fresh rainbow trout was not available at the supermarket back in the time of which I speak and there were no fishmongers nearby. As changing the menu simply did not occur to me, EH was forced to scour the four corners of the earth in a pescatorial treasure hunt.

Eventually he returned to the Eastern Bloc kitchen and left me to wrestle with six whole oncorhynchus mykiss.

The recipe book demonstrated how to fillet them whole. It looked straightforward enough. A smiley big haired blonde sliced open each fish with surgical precision, opened out the fillets and ran a rolling pin gently down the length of the spine. Using a fine bladed knife she then extracted the entire vertebrae with ease. Voila! Even the fish heads looked impressed.

Not having the luxury of a rolling pin I searched the flat for something to substitute for it. High up in the hall cupboard was a large Aladdin vacuum flask. Perfect.

Excited by my ingenuity I failed to notice as I wielded the large Aladdin flask that far from gently loosening the spine it was actually pulverizing it. I spent several hours picking out minute particles of crushed fish bone from each increasingly deflated looking trout.

The guests arrived and I accepted a glass of wine from EH. The era of responsible drink driving had not quite arrived so he plied our guests with as much alcohol as would deflect their attention from my cooking and cranked up the Hall and Oates.

We were quite the entertainment team.

The salmon mousse entrée with Melba toast made soggy by the non-ventilated kitchen was edible. It’s red and black football colour themed lumpfish roe garnish, however, failed to impress.

I am thankful Instagram had not been invented.

Having consumed several glasses of fortifying wine at this point I had to be reminded to deal with the fish.

I set about pan-frying each mutilated rainbow trout as shown by the smiling big haired blonde. Turning the first fish with the spatula I watched with horror as both the head and the tail dropped off. That’s ok, I reasoned, that one can be mine. This happened to every single one of them.

Without the benefit of a microwave, I had thrown six baseball sized potatoes into the oven moments before the entrees were served.

EH wandered in, genially inquiring as to what the hold up was? I looked at him murderously over the carcasses of my trout.

“I’ll just take the salad in then, shall I? I might just dim the lights a bit more too…”

I served the anatomically arranged trout with charred almond butter sauce and a potato. As the first rock hard tuber shot across the table EH was moved to retrieve the satanic cookbook and exhibit just what my culinary impetus had been. This was thoughtful of him.

Everyone looked baffled as they were presented with their dessert. I had inexplicably vandyked cantaloupe halves and arranged slices of kiwi fruit and strawberries at the apex of each vee; a container of vanilla icecream was plonked in the middle of the table. By this time I was beyond caring.

Honestly? Just put them on your head.

I can confirm that things improved markedly from here and that subsequent dinner parties, while borrowing more from Peter-where’s-the-cheese-Russell-Clark than Julia Child, were nevertheless eminently more successful.

Of course there was the time I nearly poisoned the parish priest, but that’s another blog.

No really, you’ll have to wait.

Posted in humor | Tagged cooking, dinner parties, entertaining, ex husband, humor, Julia Child, Rainbow trout, trout almondine | 8 Comments

What’s cooking?

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Learning the hard way

Second born is quietly going about the business of preparing for another stint of living in the USA (stand back!)

There’s not a whole lot I’m required to do. Unlike the good old days when I was the boss of everything, she is perfectly capable of organizing visas and other important travel related stuff that to be frank I only half listened to, but you get the idea.

Back when she was at school and her father and I were bombarded with yearly implorations to attend whichever educational travel opportunity was on offer, we were obliged to be informed.

Entire forests were felled to provide the paper on which endless notices detailing lists of equipment and supplies, travel itineraries or payment options were sent home and discovered days later during the weekly school bag fumigation. I’d love a dollar for every decomposing banana I plunged my short-term memory deficient fingers into whilst searching for the latest bulletin.

Then there were the compulsory information nights for the big trips – those alleged learning junkets everywhere from Alice Springs to Italy. Lectured on responsibility, school representation, respect – and that was just the parents – every conceivable contingent was discussed. Nothing left to chance, no detail unexplored and not even the most clueless parental question unanswered. Good. We are under control. Done. Can we go home now?

So now she does it all herself and the only burning question I have for her is, what are you going to eat?

It occurs to me that I have a parental tendency to channel an Italian nonna.

Did you eat? Are you hungry? What did they feed you? Can I fix you a plate? Hang on, now I’m channelling New Jersey…

A fellow blogger posted a wonderfully nostalgic piece about a virulently hued breakfast cereal with all the nutritional value of fairy floss, that he suddenly developed an adult craving for. He’s a funny guy, it’s a good read and I’ll try and do one of those fancy ping back’s which means you can all read it too. See, how I give?

Anyway, this tied in nicely with food reports from the child after last years American foray at a summer camp in Massachusetts. It also cemented my resolve to furnish her with a book of handwritten recipes tentatively called, ‘Cook something and then call your mother.’

It’s a working title.

The child revealed that the food at camp was bland to the point of rendering her taste buds obsolete. When the flavor highlight for the week is macaroni and cheese you know it’s time to send over the spice rack, for what can’t be improved by the addition of chilli flakes, cumin, paprika or fennel seeds?

We pondered the difficulty of sourcing bread or milk that doesn’t taste like dessert and she revealed the disappointing reality of Hershey bars – which taste, according to my cocoa loving child, like salty mould. Given there is only around 4%-10% of actual chocolate in a Hershey bar this shouldn’t surprise.

She says she can taste the love in my cooking – the love and the garlic. In fairness, her comparative domestic culinary experiences have revolved around my ex-husband and his limited repertoire of frozen brussel sprouts and lamb chops and her stepmother’s grim faced antipathy to any recipe with more than two ingredients.

I was always going to look better.

So I have begun scribbling down some family favourites. I found a slice recipe we invented together, employing stale breakfast cereal (High in fibre, low in fat, salt AND sugar) and crushed pecans. You can’t tell me there won’t be a misty, homesick eye when she finds THAT one.

There is also an idiot-proof recipe for biscuits (as in cookies) that uses Milo. Astonishingly, Americans have not realized just how marvelous a difference Milo makes, for it is only sold at specialty stores catering for ex-pats and experimental locals.

They seem to prefer Nesquick with its superior solubility and excessive sugar content. The Canadians, god love them, have a version of Milo but it’s formula is infinitely sweeter and the granular chocolate powder dissolves completely. Where’s the fun in that? How can you make a chocolate moustache if it doesn’t sit like crusty pond scum on top of the milk?

Thanks to an Aunt working at Kraft she has a vegemite lifeline for the next year. Unsurprisingly her small charges at camp were universally baffled by Vegemite’s yeasty appeal and wondered why anyone would voluntarily consume a paste of salty axle grease.

What can I say? We’re brought up on the stuff.

Look, I’m not really worried about her. With access to an organic farmers market and an ability to chop, flame and serve a combination of food groups the child won’t starve.

But I think the Steve Miller band say it best:

Living in the U.S.A

Come on try it, you can buy it, you can leave it next week, yeah

Somebody give me a cheeseburger

Posted in Family, humor | Tagged children, cooking, Hershey bar, humour, Milo, Steve Miller Band, travel, United States, vegemite | 9 Comments

Talk to the hands.

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Learning the hard way

I am a big fan of people who talk with their hands. Ok, just to clarify, I’m not referring to sign language or sock puppets, but rather people who accompany all conversation with extravagant hand gestures.

I have a tendency towards conversational flailing myself and have been known on occasion, to catch my nostril with a rogue fingernail or knock off my own glasses during a particularly spirited and gesticulating discussion. But aside from the essential klutziness that peppers my own speech, there is something refreshingly emphatic about people who illustrate their point by jabbing at the air. While an undulating hand movement, in the style of Sale of the Century, renders the most pedestrian of objects interesting, fluttering phalanges transform banal blather into veritable theatre.

When I was small my father posited the suggestion that were my hands to be tied behind my back I would be rendered mute. For the record, he never actually tested that theory, although he was more than capable of silencing me with other proven methods. At this point, it would be positively Disney-esque to reveal that my youthful prattle was quelled by toffee or honeycomb, when in fact, the explanation is far more prosaic – he was a controlling domestic bully whose disciplinary measures would not have been out of place at Guantanamo Bay.

Moving on.

Last weekend I met a fabulous gay couple at a Jose James gig – Hell-oooohhh Jazz hands!

Frequently, it must be said, your fabulous gay man combines warmth, wit and charm with well considered and distinctly illustrative hand gestures to back up whichever hilarious anecdote he is regaling you with. I fit right in; although there is the ever-present danger someone will be accidently bitch slapped in the conversational cross fire.

In a bid to ingratiate myself quickly – for time stands still for no aging fag hag – I launched into a tale of recent embarrassment led ostensibly by my hands. I was on a sales reconnoiter in one of Victoria’s goldfield towns. True to its Victorian era heritage, this ultra conservative country town west north west of Melbourne housed three businesses of varying fortune that I wanted to check out. Chatting with helpful staff at the first two I was optimistic about visiting the third and most coveted.

My preamble began with the usual hand flourish – the gesture that in its eloquent insouciance says, ‘Hello friend, am I here to ram my wares down your metaphoric throat? Nay! I am merely scouting for opportunity in a pleasantly non-pushy manner.’

Ok – I grant you that appears to be an awful lot conveyed by an artful wave, but accompanied by my verbal bells and whistles everyone gets the idea.

Usually.

The teen recipient of this initial overture backed away in search of a senior staffer better equipped to deal with my wild eyed delivery and theatrical arms.

“Um, our buyer, Mr – (*don’t remember, didn’t much care) is busy but Sandra is coming out to talk to you.”

Thank you, young sales clerk!

Sandra pounded down the aisle and stood arms akimbo before me with a face suggestive of a recently sucked lemon.

“Jane, is it?”

“Yes! Hi Sandra thanks so much for popping out to see me…blah blah…appreciate your time…blah blah…don’t want to sell you anything…blah blah…really value your insight into brands that are meeting expectation and those that aren’t…snore…yada yada…so if you wouldn’t mind just talking me through…”

Ignoring the mutinous look on her face, I launched into a well-practiced routine and utilised the sweeping game show hand/arm gesture as I spoke. Motioning towards a bank of window displays I assumed Sandra was swept up with me, and my damn chatty hands. Not so. She remained rooted defiantly to the spot.

Some twelve steps away I stopped and pivoted.

Okay….

I strode confidently back to her.

“Or, we could just talk here.”

“Mr – (*Cannot retain because I am JUST not sufficiently interested) is not buying anything and he doesn’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to talk to you either.”

I just don’t thrive on this stuff and I kind of wanted to head butt Sandra at this point.

I left, walking and talking at Sandra’s righteously retreating back and eventually extracted the necessary information from Fred, a sales assistant hired in 1952.

Back at the jazz gig, my two new fabulous gay acquaintances were with me through the entire reconstruction. Three gins ensured the performance was flawlessly comic and not merely a sad indictment on my particular brand of sales cluelessness.

Borderline besties now, it was time to appreciate the jazz. Oh, that’s right…I don’t like jazz.

Look, I don’t mind the occasional spot of Latin jazz for who among us doesn’t secretly enjoy a bit of merengue? And what could be more diverting than nodding along to the Dave Brubeck quartet and sipping on a Tom Collins? It’s all that incomprehensible free style stuff that I find so obnoxious.

Jose James combines Jazz and Hip Hop, which perhaps unsurprisingly fails to double my enjoyment. It was with enormous effort I restrained myself from leaping on stage and biffing him on the back of the head after a particularly protracted session of vocal sampling.

Jose is a great looking guy. He had a coterie of young mostly female fans flanking the stage and vying for his attention. This seemed to be achieved with interpretive dance. It’s important to realize here that everyone looks stupid dancing to jazz music but hats off for trying. I watched as people valiantly attempted coordinated movement to non-syncopated rhythm.

Unless you are prepared to youtube some signature moves from Bob Fosse , best stick with head nodding, finger clicking and toe tapping….man.

Back to topic, so we are leaving the venue and everyone is waxing lyrical about the gig including my new fabulous gay acquaintances’ (FGA’s) who are all, ‘so did you just love it?’ and in a previous incarnation I would have squealed and flapped in appreciative unison, but not these days. Today its both hands outstretched, fingers splayed in a resounding gesture of NOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Posted in humor | Tagged Bob Fosse, dancing, Dave Brubeck, gay men, Gesture, Hip Hop, humor, Jazz, Jose James, sales | Leave a comment

Can we fix it? Probably not.

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Learning the hard way

*Bob the builder is back. He appears to have an apprentice now which you’d think would have sped up the process, but it hasn’t.

We noticed a small patch of darkening plaster on the en suite ceiling a little over 18 months ago. The patch spread and morphed into a constellation of mould.

Our landlord lives in regional victoria. A landed gentleman with a scattering of investment properties he had been a delight to deal with when we first moved in. Eschewing an agent and negotiating directly we had all been very happy with the arrangement.

“Anything you need, any problems, anything at all, just give us a bell and I’ll get onto it for you”

So we let him know about the en suite ceiling.

“I’ll get Bob straight on to that.”

The concept of time in regional Victoria appears to have a more relaxed impetus to our permanent city-slicker hustle, for it was several months before the builder got ‘straight onto it’. Eventually an appointment was made and I arranged to be home.

Expecting a robust chappie wearing yakkas, a pair of blundstones and a tool belt, imagine my disappointment surprise when I opened the door to the builder. Here was a stooped, emphysemic senior wearing a brown cardigan and corduroy shoes. In fact, come to think of it, he bore a striking resemblance to O’Reilly the incompetent builder in Fawlty Towers.

He shuffled up the stairs and without direction from me, headed straight into the bedroom.

“You appear to know your way around.” I commented, slightly unnerved.

“Yep. All these places have been a real bastard. Leaks in every one of them. Built quick, built cheap. Shonky alright.”

“So you’ve fixed leaks at our neighbours’?”

He erupted in a fit of coughing and disappeared onto the balcony for a cigarette.

I read that as a yes and left him to it.

Apparently Bob’s first visit was for the purposes of reconnaissance, which explained the lack of tools and the fact that other than three cigarette breaks on the balcony and one cup of tea, nothing actually got done.

“Well, I’ve found the problem and I’ll be back tomorrow morning at eight.”

Thus established a month long routine whereby Bob would arrive some hours after the stated 8am start, ascend the stairs with alarmingly labored breathing and contemplate the street below as he smoked on our balcony, pausing occasionally to daub the guttering area with rubber paint.

Eventually he declared the problem solved.

The beginning of autumn heralded the first of the serious rainstorms. Our en suite ceiling damp patch had spread further and we had a new watermark on the bedroom ceiling.

We called the landlord.

“I’ll get Bob straight onto that.”

Apparently it was too wet to work but we were assured the job would be done as soon as the weather fined up. Meanwhile our entire en suite ceiling was mottled and water was dripping from the three- in- one light fitting.

Another month passed and the plaster surrounding the light had crumbled away entirely. Dangling from exposed wiring, the light cast uneasy shadows across the walls and mirror. The exhaust fan had ceased to work at all and our mould colony was mounting an attack across the venetian blinds.

When the long grey days of winter passed and we were sneezing our way through spring, the builder, like an asthmatic groundhog, emerged from hibernation.

“Hi Jane, Bob Murphy here. I’ll be there at eight tomorrow morning.”

The doorbell rang at 8am on the dot. Well, I thought, this is a turn up for the books; maybe the Bob-meister is finally on it. I opened the door to a man in his mid thirties who may well have been the country’s oldest apprentice builder.

Fortunately he hadn’t modelled himself on Bob’s Friday night at the RSL look and was clad in serviceable Bisley cargo pants and a Ramones tee shirt – functional and edgy.

Bob’s assistant (whose name I never bothered to memorise) waited, tea in hand, on the offending balcony for Bob to arrive a good hour later.

I left them to it.

Returning later in the day I discovered that several sheets of plywood had replaced the decrepit ceiling and a blanket of sodden plaster chips carpeted the en suite floor and half our bedroom.

A series of diagonal grid lines had been etched on the stone tiles of the leaky balcony floor above and I reasonably assumed they would return to finish the job.

Six weeks later, I got the call.

“Hi Jane, Bob Murphy here. I’ll be there on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week”.

“Let me guess, you’ll be here at eight?”

Bob evidently had a ferocious bout of Monday-itis and didn’t rally until Tuesday at 9.23am. His assistant didn’t manifest at all. Any wonder he was the world’s oldest apprentice, if our particular job was anything to go by, he probably had to work for ten years just to learn how to use a hammer.

By days end on the Tuesday our entire balcony area had been retiled.

Bob called that night to advise that he would be back in the morning to finally complete the job. Seriously, all 485,000 square meters of the Sydney Harbour Bridge could have been painted in the time it had taken this man to fix our measly leak.

Wednesday came and went. No Bob. A week passed and the first of his tiles were already falling off.

Our ensuite still has a temporary plywood ceiling and a new leak has appeared in the garage. We sent a photographic compendium of Bob’s less than stellar work to our landlord, who, in light of the imminent repairs this time last year, had optimistically increased our rent. There will be a further rent increase OVER MY DEAD BODY.

Frankly, I can live with the temporary ceiling and am happy to hide the patchy tiles with pot plants; and while our landlord has paid for work that has never actually been completed I am perfectly happy not to be waiting for Bob –

(like) EVER AGAIN.

*Not his real name.

**Which is actually Chris, but I prefer Bob.

Posted in humor | Tagged Balcony, Bathroom, builders, Business, Ceiling, Fawlty Towers, humor, Landlord, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Wednesday | 2 Comments

Learning The Hard Way

Ageing Beauty

Not a brainiac.

Game of shut up!

The knead to relax.

Dude, where’s my service?

The Dinner Party

What’s cooking?

Talk to the hands.

Can we fix it? Probably not.

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