Another two fucking months?!

I clearly don't understand how time works. That's the only excuse I can come up with.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes! Spain was awesome, and I would recommend Barcelona as a birthday destination to anyone. The weather was spectacular, the food defies description, and the architecture would break your heart. I'm planning a return trip very soon.

I also had a pre- and post-birthday presents in the forms of Paul's visit at the start of September and Rob and Irena's visit at the end. My friends are besotted with my Australian guests, and I strongly encourage you all to keep coming and besotting them.

Apart from all of the excitement, things here are going... well, they're going. I'm still really struggling to find my niche. It's bloody hard trying to settle into a new life at this age and by myself. I actually think it would have been easier if I'd gone somewhere entirely new, because it's really easy to be complacent here when I know the city so well. It wouldn't have been at all feasible, of course - I needed the material support that people in Boston could offer me - but it's deceptively hard because I feel like it should have been easier to settle back into somewhere I know, when in fact I've lived my entire adult life elsewhere and I don't have the slightest idea how anything works, but I also don't have any obvious markers of foreign-ness so people expect me to get it. It's... I don't know. It's not easy.

On the other hand, though, I'm really trying not to dwell too much on this stuff. It's hard, as I have a dwelling-oriented brain and not nearly enough to occupy/distract it at the moment, but I'm trying to do some power-of-positive-thinking things. Like, I've decided to allow myself to spend up to $15/week on nice, (usually) tropical flowers for the house. They make me happy, and happy is worth $15. And I'm trying to find something beautiful in every situation - like, actively looking for it. Right now I'm at my desk at work, so there's not much immediately in front of me (except a bottle of mannequin lubricant, which is... I mean, I have the *most* ridiculous job), but I'm able to find something in most places, and that seems to help. I at least feel like I'm trying, so that's good.

Things with The Lawyer are officially off again. It's... guys, it's rough, I'm not going to lie. Paul met her, and Rob and Irena met both her and The Chef; the verdict is that she's great (true), and The Chef is great (true), and... and I need to meet someone who is neither of them, because both situations are fundamentally busted (entirely, completely, 100% true).

I think a big part of this is that I need to meet new people full stop - I need to broaden my friend base - but it is bloody hard to do that at this age and in this situation. I've met a couple of people I like at work, but no one I want to pursue as an Outside Friend; and I love my belly dancing crew but most of them live outside of Boston (well outside) and aren't really viable options. If I were the sort of person who liked playing sports or going to bars to socialise with people I don't know? I'd be golden. However, I am neither of those people and I like neither of those things - in fact, both send waves of panic through me. So... seriously, what else? Please, suggestions. I need to find a way in.


XOXO

Um, hi.

It's been too long. I know it has. I've tried to stick to an at-least-weekly posting schedule, but the last few weeks have involved a lot of feeling crazy and running around in circles, partly for real reasons and partly because my head broke. Having re-read my last few posts, I don't think that news will come as any great shock, but it's nothing to worry about - it was a quieter break, more of a blown fuse than a full-on outage. I just needed to sit in a dark corner for a while, and with that having been accomplished, I feel a bit more together.

Fall has come crashing down around us, and so far it's been cold, wet and miserable. I'm hoping the weather will pick up and give me some of those crisp, sunny autumn days that feel like apples taste, but for now it's weighing heavily on everyone. Winter's on its way, no mistake, and it's a cunt of a season. Fall also means the end of baseball (no playoff run for the Sox this year), the start of football (Tom, darling, the hair), and a whole new menu centered around butternut pumpkin. In the last week, I have seen three new recipes involving butternut, including an amazing-looking butternut lasagna, and I've had an impassioned plea for pumpkin pie from an unpindownable Floridian refugee who compensates for New England weather by charming baked goods out of people too sympathetic to refuse. She also has a very sweet dog and uses him shamelessly. (Please do not take this opportunity to list the many reasons I should know better. I do. It's out of my hands. The dog's too cute.)

In better news, Lynne and Laura are coming for a visit. They arrive on Tuesday, and we'll kick around Boston until Friday, when we'll head up to Montreal. That's right, kids, I'm off to visit our moose-strewn neighbours to the north. Never thought I'd see the day. Still, I take comfort in knowing that at least the Quebecois are smart enough not to want to be part of Canada either. Either way, I'm looking forward to having some friendly accents about the place.

And in weird food news for the day: carn the pies! I don't know if I'm shitty that they're going to be all the way over in Southie or seriously grateful that I won't have easy access to that kind of calorie bump. Either way, I'm thrilled to bits to have them.

XOXO

Enter the Confessional 2: Angry Girl Music of Any Persuasion

Using music to hurt people. It's easy, it's a weapon. Mandy did it: when she didn't think the crowd was worth much, she'd telegraph that by playing her most commercial tracks (and bear in mind that in this context, 'commercial' would be more correctly spelled with a silent '-unt' after the first letter). I remember one night at Slide she played that fucking Sneaky Sound System song three times in one set, just to make the point... well, and because Micky particularly hated it. I remember Micky shaking her head and grinning just a little bit more each time. I remember laughing.

I once saw Armand van Helden do it too, in Boston, too many years ago to count. I was standing behind the DJ booth, watching while he played, and his disdain for the crowd was palpable. I don't know what we'd done to offend him, but whatever it was, he took it out on us for the full two hours, striking the final blow with Stardust's 'Music Sounds Better'. He knew this track would go over big, and fuck, did he resent us for it. It was all over his face and all over his hands as they moved across the decks, even going so far as to cut it for a few bars in that bit where the music drops out and it's just the chorus, to catch every single person in the capacity crowd belting out the lyrics. Except that it backfired: the moment was so perfect - strangers in harmony, lasers going mental, manic thronging bliss - that instead of showing us what commercial losers we all were, he showed himself up as a complete twat.

(Interestingly, I saw Paul Oakenfold at the same club two weeks later, and although he was by every measure a bigger deal than Armand van Helden - more skilled, more established, heaps more respected - he sang and danced along with his tracks like a teenager and generally looked to be having the time of his life, and the night was infinitely better for it. There's a lesson to be learned there.)

I do it too, but the battles I fight are mostly in my own head. 'Paper Planes' by M.I.A., that's a big one. I can't hear it without recalling the days/weeks/months when the lyrics of anger and explosions pushed a very particular button for me. 'Bulletproof' by La Roux, that's another one that carries a few connotations, some from the same time as 'Paper Planes', some from earlier. And 'Leaving Home' by Jebediah. Every angry teenager's wet dream of a rebellion song, to the point that I've integrated it into my own memories from years before I heard it. Ev, Amy and Kat used it as the themesong to a roadtrip they took years before I met them, a roadtrip to which I came no closer than seeing a single photo of the three of them at a waterfall, and yet in my head I'm there, in the back seat of Aims's little car, cheering along with a chorus I wouldn't learn for several years to come.

I guess it's not new, then, the way time gets lost in my head. The second half of 2008 doesn't exist for me. Much of early 2009 is a blur too, but late 2008, I honestly could not swear to anything that happened. It's gone, vanished. And I realised last week that the same thing has happened over the last six months: September 8th marked six months since I left Sydney, and I have no idea how that happened. I cannot account for the time, or the things I've done, or most of the people I've met. All I know is that I must be nearing the statute of limitations on the phrase 'just moved back from Australia', yet to me it feels as fresh as a torn fingernail. I still say 'heaps' and flatten my short 'a' sounds; I still write 's' instead of 'z' and say zed instead of zee; I've recently offered a chef I've never met in person very, very dirty sex in exchange for recreating the laksa I miss to the core of my being.

I don't know how to stop being the person I've been for the last 11 years. It's more than I can get my head around.

In through the nose, out through the mouth.

You guys.

For the last two days I've been having run-ins with the American taxation and health care systems. They are... like, I don't even have the words. I don't know how to say all the things that are wrong or how astoundingly wrong those things are. I don't know how it is that either of these systems could be so completely broken and yet still be the civic equivalent of required reading.

I am not stupid. I am not lazy. I am not trying to do anything illegal, immoral, or even remotely out-of-the-ordinary. And yet I have, on three separate occasions over the last 24 hours, been reduced to tears by the incomprehensible garbage that governs my ability to comply with (not break, not stretch, not find-a-loophole-out-of, but comply with) federal and state law, and to access and pay for (not abuse, not cheat, not rort, but access and pay for) basic health care when I need it. And along the way I have talked to people who are kind but lack the knowledge or ability to help me; or who are unkind and uncooperative and lack the desire to help me; or who just plain need a punch in the mouth and make me want to move to Abu Dhabi tomorrow rather than deal with their bullshit one fucking second more; who are all employed to (at least in theory) help me and millions of other people do exactly what I am trying to do. None of this, none of the system that has grown up to support hundreds of millions of people, makes any fucking sense.

In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams wrote an awesome bit about how hard it was for him to discuss two obnoxious German students he had met in Africa because everything about them was such a stereotype. Writers, he said, should be in the business of destroying stereotypes, not enforcing them. He eventually decides to deal with the problem by making them Latvians instead, which made all of their annoying qualities interesting instead of cliched, and also allowed him to use the line, 'a smile played across his thin Latvian lips' - an excellent result all around. Unfortunately, I do not have that luxury. My recent experiences are so horribly, stereotypically, fundamentally American that to assign them to any other country would rob them of their power (and be unnecessarily cruel to whatever nation I'd picked on). But the flip side of this is that because everyone already knows that our health care system sucks ass and our tax codes were written by day patients, I cannot communicate how truly heinous it is to have to deal with these things in real life: if I rant about it, I sound whingy; if I joke about it, I sound like a hack (amirite, ladies?); and if I try to give you the information straight, I still sound like I'm exaggerating because unless you've been through it personally you would not believe that it could be this fucking ridiculous. So this is where I'll end. I'll shake it off and get on with my day, because that's all I can do, because somehow I've ended up back in a country where these systems are the systems.

Thanks, Internet!

With respect to Mary from Junee (R.I.P.), it's been a bit of a sea hunt of a week. I have a couple of things I'm keen to write about but I haven't had the energy and tomorrow I'm off to Provincetown, gay capital of the Atlantic coast, for what is unlikely to be an at-all-wild weekend. But I wanted to leave you with something I've been promising you for a while, so....

Go here. And no one gets to make fun of my getting the giggles.

XOXO