c'mon get happy

I was a Young the last time I broke up with anybody. I remember smoking Marlboro Lights in earnest, eating nothing but green apples and Mars bars and obsessively tracking down and watching movies on VHS starring Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret, Jane Fonda, or really anyone with a bouffant updo, which you can do when you work fifteen hours a week and attend school for probably less than five. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get lots of root volume and sourced spiral bobby pins. I read Colette novels with the constant feeling that a lot of subtext was going right over my bouffant. After a few months I felt better.

Now that I'm a lady of more advanced years, I'm wise to the fact that in addition to killing you, cigs are pretty gross and so are the marionette lines they give you, green apples are hell on tooth enamel and when it comes to BB's dramatic range, she nailed libidinous petulance like nobody before or since but is unable to portray any other emotion or attitude convincingly. With the possible exceptions of revisiting the oevres of Ann-M and Jane via online streaming and giving Colette another crack I knew the old method wasn't going to work. Growns don't have the luxury of falling in a heap. I googled how to cope with a breakup and this site came up, and explained the sixty day no-contact rule.

Harsh? Yes, but fundamental. You have to get on with the Single You, because that's who you are now. Even if you're in denial, you still have to keep away and give'em a chance to miss you, if you want'em back. Not working in my case, I might add, but that's the way it is. I have tried to learn from the pain I've seen friends experience in trying to believe that a week into a split, they can sit on the couch and watch TV with their ex and its all hunkydory because they are now going to be Friends. It's a popular approach despite there being zero successful cases reported in the literature. People just break up again over and over until they feel like dying. How many times did I want to crash the same car? I have to make a new life full of fun by myself and my ex can't help me with that. If we're to be friends, that will work itself out when it works itself out.

So yay! I don't feel like dying, But I do have the Sadness. I've been managing it, and adding some new Happy by:

Waking up at five. This isn't new, I was always waking up at five, because that's when Edie rehearses her role in a Korean horror film. She plays Throatsitting Cat, who sucks out souls with her claws. You're not falling back asleep after a wakeup like that, though I'd try. I'd only get up at seven groggy and moody. A couple weeks ago I asked the Universe for more hours in the day, not really expecting I'd hear back about it.  A few days later it occurred to me maybe I was supposed to be rising at five and that there was my extra two hours. So I wake up, feed Edie, jump back in bed to read one freaky book or another for about an hour, and write 750 words. After that I feel moderately chirpy so I get up and do a yoga DVD. I'm not tired through the day like I was worried I might be, and I'm drifting off to sleep really well at night, same bedtime as ever.

So yeah, yoga. Circus training finished and it took only a few months for my core strength to disappear and I became al blobfish. But exercise is a mood booster and the more you do it the more you start to want to do it so I just thought I'd do the minimum possible, but every day. That meant a half-hour yoga DVD I've owned for ten years. Its working really well, its a self-fulfilling positive feedback-loop of doing it often enough to see changes and being motivated to then do it longer. You also get addicted to the dopamine release. I feel myself becoming flexier, I'm getting back my core strength, my arms are getting strong and I'm getting all balancey! I can do that side-angle balance-on-one-arm-and-side-of-one-foot pose and lift my top leg up! For several seconds! My next challenge is the stand- on-one-leg-while-grabbing-the-big-toe-of-your-other-leg-and-stretching-it-out-all-long-and-elegant. I also might go back to circus training and do an aerial class next term. TJ and I are going to a one-day introductory class over in Fitzroy sometime soon to try it out.

Cold showers in the morning for three minutes. No, not for the reason you think. Well sorta I guess but mostly, because if you stand under the cold water for one hundred and eighty seconds, that's generally the worst you're gonna feel all that day. About one hundred and twenty seconds in, the water actually stops feeling cold, and you get a really nice feeling for the last minute, because you can hack it. Cold-water therapy is a Thing, it amps up the happy dopamine in your brain and can be used to treat depression. I'm not depressed of course, just got the Sads but I figure I need all the neurochemical boosters I can get. I highly recommend. To be honest I did it religiously for the first two weeks or so and now only every couple of days but I should get back to everyday, it really is so helpful. Cold water's better for your hair too.

Smoothies. I only wanted to eat icecream from the tub and you can't keep that up for long so I compromised and told myself I could eat smoothies until I felt like something else. I was over that in about a week but I've kept up the morning smoothie habit. I put frozen berries, coconut milk, cooled green tea, yoghurt, and shredded coconut in, also chia seeds for some omega-3 realness and raw kale leaves because they have something in them that's good for maybe your face? I forget and you can't taste them whizzed up with the berries.Cocoa nibs or Carob pods. You got any smoothie recipes for me?

Much purchasing of consumer products. I usually am the very opposite of a spendthrift but lately its seemed like a good time to buy all the things.  Several striped fine woollen layering jumpers more alike than different. I planned on biking over to a shop on Chapel Street that stocks luxurious versions of quotidian household items priced to incite class warfare. I would cackle as I forked over one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and beam as I left the store swinging a tissue-lined bag containing a famous French candle that smells like a burning hardwood forest full of endangered wildlife. But when I gleefully let my friend Bec in on the plan she was outraged and unilaterally forbade it. She'd driven me out to Southland on the Nepean Highway and so we smelled thirty-dollar candles for a half hour before settling on one that smells of '1977', which is pear and lime if you didn't know, and I cheered Bec on as she bought a Sodastream for her toddler. A Sophie Dahl cookbook.  A flippy board thingy you use to fold your jumpers so they're all the same size and you can stack them up like in the shop. Drunkards Path quilting templates, a special foot for sewing them together and some more Anna Maria Horner Field Study charm squares. A metric shit-ton of Freya and Cleo bras. I fancied myself among the 20% of women wearing the correct bra size, but the smug got knocked out of me when I got properly fitted at a speciality shop I ducked into and was bereft at the news that I'm sized out of Elle MacPherson. And it turns out I'd been wearing my boobs an inch lower than I needed to be. But I tripped out of the shop swinging a bag of cute Freyas and have ordered a bunch of discontinued styles off ebay because I went down a wormhole of alllllllll the preeeetteeeee lingerieeeeeeeee! A set of seventy-two Derwent Inktense coloured pencils in a two-tiered wooden presentation box. You should get some, though if noone broke up with you in the last few months you probably only want a set of twelve or twenty-four, I'm really thinking I did go overboard. The colours are mixable with water, and you can draw on cotton or silk with them and then use water to make it look like you painted it on with ink, and it's supposed to be permanent. I'll show you when they get here. They're for my inner child really, who misses her Crayola Caddy. I'm making a wedding present for my friends Chris and Audrey and I think the Inktense pencils will have something to do with it. Freaky little cheap cosmetic things like Healthy Hoof cuticle cream (it's terrific!) and Collagen Lip Masks from China. Its only a few dollars and it's nice to have that anticipation for the post each day on the way home. Both ebay and the seller have warned me I should expect delays in delivery of the Lip Masks, intimating that this is due to them occupying some sort of importation/safety grey area, so I'm hoping that means they work on marionette lines.

The shopoholism was fun while it lasted but its done with now- I've run out of money and am allergic to debt and I'm into people, not things. Good times are hanging out with my sister and little baby Bonnie, and friends both old and new. TJ, Jenny and I are becoming quite the little sewing-and-restaurant-eating posse. We've carried on like pork chops since the word go, and we've got a sewing day planned at my my place in a few weeks that I'm super excited about. We're going to be bra-sewing actually, cobbling together various patterns and perusing the Making Beautiful Bras DVD and book. I sort of wish I had remembered I was so soon to be sewing bras when I went on my lingerie-buying binge but then again would it really have stopped me? Anyway I'll have many styles to copy and I'll be in the 20% of women sewing the right size.

Edie and quilting, making me happy.

quilt it out

My quilt tops were piling up, so I bit the bullet and learned how to freemotion quilt because I have a lot of time on my hands and a greater willingness to spend my money on more fabric than to send the tops off to be longarmed.  Leah Day, Freemotion Queen, says pick a design and just g'head and quilt an entire quilt with it, and you'll know it inside-out by the time you're done. I did the rainbow over a few evenings, and though it's got a few hundred thread-birdnests on the back, I sure did grok the stipple by completion. The quilt now lives on my wall so noone will see the nests.

My second quilt had fewer nests but isn't bound yet so no picture. The lucky third up there on the left is my crowning achievement. I had the speed of the machine and the hand movement in a nice rhythm, I'd worked out how to stop and start and weave in the stringy-ends, I was wired-in to the groovy flow zone and then it was over too soon! Now that I've got it I think it's my favourite part of the quilting process, and totally my new yoga. And what it has over actual yoga is, you're sitting down. You got a quilt sandwich you want me to stipple for you?

I used charm squares from Anna Maria Horner's Field Study, which is, in my humble opinion, the most perfect fabric collection ever created. I had fun messing around with dozens of possible half-square triangle arrangements but in the end I wanted a strong, simple graphic effect. So I went with chevrons, but wondered if their cultural moment is on the wane? I'm always the last to know these things. To be on the safe side I repurposed them as zigzags by turning them ninety degrees.  Latschky saw the quilt in progress and said she loooooved it, so guess what she got for her birthday last week? I worked a little secret message for her into the quilting in glow-in-the-dark thread.

Thankyou so much for your kind comments and emails after my last post. I am alternately OMGSOTOTALLYOKKTHANXBAI!!!-Universe and MRRRAAAWAARGHGHGH!!!WHYYYYYYYY!?!?!?!-Universe but I am managing. I'm being pretty good about getting stuck into sewing projects in the evenings. Doing Things rather than ruminating and snarfing two-litre completers of mint chocolate chip icecream in front of reality TV is the way to go, I know... not that that ever happened... much. I'll just say, your spoon hits the bottom of one of those even quicker than you'd think. I've got Pattern Runway's Sweet Shorts about half-completed. I had an awesome city meetup with TJ. She of the Perfect Nose took me out and had me giggling all day as we bounced from fabric stores to munching chorizo at Little Creatures to checking out costumes at the NGV. She also showered me with gifts, one of which was this book by the lady who makes Amy Sedaris' fancy frocks, telling me I needed it to make a party-dress because did I know I was going to Poppykettle's upcoming Sewciatie event? I hadn't known this and I'm so glad she told me! I can't wait.

OK, Universe

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been making my way through an odd set of exercises in a book full of such total and unsurpassed wackadoo-ness that I mostly can't comprehend it. Over a decade and a half ago I came across it while clearing off a sharehouse bookshelf, where it had been left by my housemate's ex-boyfriend Michael. Its size, cover and binding had a holy-writ vibe so it really stuck out among the back-issues of THE FACE and large-format Taschen photo compilations of Pierre & Gilles. I grabbed it.

"Damo, what is this?"

"Oh noooo!!! That is really oogie-boogie."

"Yeah? What's the idea?"

"Well, this Jewish psychiatrist wrote down all this stuff she said Jesus was dictating to her and it basically tells you you're projecting the entire world from your imagination, and then a guy who ran the CIA PROGRAM FOR BRAINWASHING PEOPLE published it in the seventies. If you do the workbook in the back you lose your mind and disappear."

My nostrils and eyelids flared. "Cool!" I eagerly flicked to find the crazy but the print was small and dense so nothing registered. I put the book in the hallway with the other piles because we had to paint the living room walls grey and the plasterwork blood red and throw a two-day party. 

I didn't think of the book again until last year, when I got sucked into an internet wormhole and started reading up on the CIA's MKULTRA program. It sparked a memory of that weird book, which indeed had a connection to a CIA employee and the ESP research that was in the movie Men Who Stare At Goats.  Some critics say the CIA man and the psychiatrist took the Hindu Vedanta and other theologies of non-dualism and rewrote them as though they were Christian. Some say they intended for the book to be disseminated among left-wing types so they'd dissociate into the inner world of their bellybuttons and get off the political scene.

I love to read about religions. I lean atheist except when I'm agnostic, but whether Jesus existed or didn't, I'm not all that cool with people saying they're channelling him.  It's the sort of thing my devoutly Catholic Nanna and Granddad would have deeply disapproved of, and it could be seen as more than a little rude to go copying religious books into, like, other religions. But I had to get ahold of a copy of this book- I mean, the CIA writes a 'Bible'!? How can you not read it!?

Funnily enough, when I started reading it, I didn't find it to have any kooky campiness value. It was actually very soothing and I really liked it. That's not to say I actually understood too much of it, but I was intrigued to learn what it was supposed to be on about so I started looking at books that kinda expounded and explained the message. I suppose I could have gone and found an English translation of the Vedanta or one of those non-dualist theologies, except that's actually only occurred to me this minute, but also, proper religions don't tend to have workbooks at the back of their scriptures, and I find I benefit from an imposed structure. The exercises are designed to get you to a state of mind where you can be OK with what the Universe chucks at you. So that you can see the opportunity for transformation that comes out of accepting circumstances that you wouldn't have chosen yourself. Seeing with eyes of love instead of eyes of fear. That sounds nice, and it's supposed to be easier to be peaceful, loving and happy that way. Apparently it only takes a year if you do one exercise a day.

There are hundreds of books-about-the-book. I bought one with pink typography written by a girl about my age who lives in New York City, because I am a bit shallow and judging by her cover photo, the woo-woo was doing amazing things for her hair. She'd also shortened the workbook to forty days of exercises.  I'm sorta doing both sets. I wasn't concerned with 'believing in it' so much as I just started doing it, and it helped. I felt a little more patient, a little more content.  Just relaxed and more often able to be mindful.

I kept it mostly to myself because all my favourite people have a low tolerance for bullshit. But one night not too long ago as I got into bed, I let go a real pearler. Something along the lines of: 'I kinda feel like you just have to go with what's going on,  even when its bad because resisting what's going on is actually what's causing a good part of the pain. Y'know? It gets easier if you can take a deep breath and be like, I don't like this, but ok, Universe!'

Don't worry, I got my comeuppance for that platitude, and I better have been serious, because shortly after I said it, I was suddenly single. After ten years. It was a total shock. But then, it also explained why a Jewel song from the nineties that came on the radio the week before had gotten stuck in my head ever since (thank goodness, it's gone now).

At base level I'm a pretty happy, glass-half-full gal, and hearing myself complain brings me down. But this has made me so, so sad. But, I am also doing okay. I've been going really hard with the ugly-cry, but I have also been paying attention to how wonderful and caring my friends are, and how funny and lovely my parents are, and how kind my sister and my brother-in-common-law are. And these wackadoo exercises have kept me focused on not getting caught up in fears about the future. I have appreciated the reminders to acknowledge all that I am grateful for. Not-complaining isn't the same as being consciously and vocally appreciative of all that you have, and there's a lot. I'm paying attention to rightnow,  and moment by moment I can make it work, and the moments seem to be getting longer. Sadness happens, and I'm just sitting there feeling it. It won't last forever. So thanks, CIA covert-brainwashing manual, and works derivative thereof. If I hadn't picked you up a couple months ago I might be in worse shape right now.

Overall, I'm super not liking this, but ok, Universe.

ta-da! another quilt finished

Well another top, anyway! The printed fabrics are Anna Maria Horner charm squares made into half-square triangles with some gray cotton I found at Cleggs.

Half-square triangles are my new favourite thing. I spent ages rearranging them into patterns and was amazed at how many different effects were possible, they're so versatile.

So that makes three on the on the to-be-backed-quilted-and-bound pile. I think the stack will get quite a bit higher. 

the birds

Last weekend we went to Warburton. We stayed at my Aunty Kerry's house and brought Chris and Aud and Laschky with us. We had some visitors...

This brightly-plumed little fellow swooped down from the trees with an expectant look, so Aud got him a snack. "Aud loves Australian wildlife, and Australian wildlife loves Aud!" Chris declared.

Aud extended the same hospitality to this kookaburra. However, after the little guy shoved aside the bread she was offering in order to stab her repeatedly in the palm with his beak, she kept her distance. "That was really brave of you Audrey, I would NEVER try feeding a kookaburra!" said Chris, as we watched the bird pick up the bread slice and bash it to smithereens against the balcony railing, and Audrey rubbed her hand. "Look how strong his beak is, and his lizard-claws! You know they kill snakes! He's seen your fingers and thought they were tender little worms!"

"Yeah," I said. "They're carnivorous! They're an extreme bird!"

"I did not know this." said Aud. "He looks so sweet! Why did noone tell me this?!" 

"Oh! We just thought you were being adventurous!"

"No! I was unaware of the danger!" 

We felt a bit bad! Aud is French, been in the country ten years but we still ought to be looking out for her in the bush! Most everyone knows that the cute koala will happily tear strips in your skin, that a kangaroo kick will put you in hospital, and that emus are just bad news all round. But does anyone think to warn visitors and immigrants of the violence seething beneath the friendly-looking, fluffy kookaburras? No, and they are all the more endangered by this omission. Gawd! writing this, I am getting a flashback to a farm trip where Aud spotted an echidna by the side of the road and we got out of the car so she could photograph it, and she reached out to pat the thing, but it ambled away. After a trip to the Healesville Sanctuary some months ago she she could talk of nothing but the Tasmanian Devil, and she went round stamping all surfaces with a little Tasmanian Devil rubber-stamp. It's lucky we're unlikely to encounter one outside captivity because I could see her attempting to tickle it under the chin and us all just watching to see what happens.

Do not underestimate Australian wildlife under any circumstances.