1. You don’t want to be ‘the other’. When there are two of you with the same name – be it Eleanor or Tegan or Dwayne – everybody else in the world who happens to know the both of you will certainly find a way to differentiate between you and the other you. The problem is if you end up being ‘the other you’.Allow me to illustrate with a table.
WINNER
LOSER
Funny You
The Other You
Smart You
The Other You
Poet You
The Other You
Jewish You
The Other You
Perfect You
The Other You
Pretty You
The Other You
Lovely You
The Other You
DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY I HEADED EACH COLUMN THE WAY I DID?
There are no loopholes or exceptions. If you are The Other You you have lost. You are a loser. Because even if your opponent is known as ‘Fat You’ or ‘Bogan You’ or ‘Smelly You’, you will still despair over why there isn’t anything remarkable enough about you to define you in your own right. You will wonder endlessly whether you only exist in relation to the non-other you. If they die, vanish to another land where there are no more yous, will you be gone too?
So I was talking to Tegan the other day.
Cool Tegan?
Nah. The Other Tegan.
Oh.
Really, there’s a substantial argument why children may be called Boat or Frame or Iron. And it’s not because their parents are morons.
1. The distinction between boys and girls is not one that you have to accept. Sometimes Giraffe is Judy and sometimes Giraffe is Steven. Sometimes Giraffe is Giraffey. I am happy this way. You could be too if you stopped judging people based on expectations related to the nether region.
2. Wear a hat in the sun. Judy will tell you now that those aren’t beauty spots, love.
3. Wear a saddle at all times. This will protect you from cowboys, small children and animals that may attempt to pick your back. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be ugly. You can wear it in your favourite colour or fabric, or dress it up with rhinestones and tassels. Giraffey likes to wear a shiny blue.
4. Stand tall. Even if you are a penguin or an iguana. Be proud of who you are and who your parents are and how they met and how you came to be. Even if it was a scummy pond and an underlit moon or a nest made desperately out of broken twigs and filled with hand-me-down blue furnishings. Love and nature and babies and eggs and pouches. It’s all beautiful. Steven has a tear in his eye.
5. Work out your best side and only ever let them photograph you from said side. Otherwise you will end up with hideous photos that come back to unveil you twenty-five years down the track. Always opt for low lighting (mood lighting, some say), and don’t make any tapes. This is probably the real advice. Hey Judy? You sexy thing.
1. My mum and my dad met on an egg farm. That’s why my mum’s nickname is chook. My mum also used to call my dad hen, which is funny because he’s a male. Mum even says that he’s not half a man. But that has nothing to do with the nickname. The nicknames happened because my mum used to call the chickens chooks and my dad used to call the chickens hens and they would always argue about what the right name is. I said they should have agreed to disagree, because my mum is always telling me to do that when my cousins come over and we start fighting. I said they should have called them chickens. My mum and my dad both laughed when I said this and they started calling me chicken. This didn’t last, though, because chicken has two syllables and does not make for a very good nickname when my real name is already very short, which is Dill, like the herb.
2. This morning we had an outing to the botanical gardens. I ventured into an iced room where they show plants from the Antarctica, though I was very comfortable in there because I had a coat. You cannot live with nurses and carers and young dilly dally maids and not leave home without a coat. They stuff you into it. It is my wish now to suffocate, one day, when I no longer want to deal with the world. I will be wearing a coat and I want the suited men to tell the dilly dalliers that I was utterly overheated. I don’t like winter and coats, but I don’t like summer either. I prefer autumn. The colours are more noticeable, greeting me at eye level and above me, as well as below me, even making sounds beneath my slippers. Besides, I enjoy the reason to stay inside. I am sly like that. I take advantage of it. They don’t tell me things in winter because I am busy pretending they’re not visiting. In the summer, my imagination gasps for water and in the dry air can find none. It croaks. That’s what old people do. They croak.
3. Josephine was a real beauty when I first met her. Course she’s not now, but she was all them years back and that’s why I wanted to push her up against the jukebox and play her a tune of me own. God, she was beautiful. And she was taken by my song. She moved her hips and she danced with her arms swinging out to her sides, letting out some little girl screams when I broke into the chorus. I was going to be a rock star all them years back and Josephine was going to come with me and stay by my side. But she kept dancing even when I smashed my guitar, when Dan was taken by the coppers. She couldn’t keep her damned arms still, looking like a crazy woman, being thrown out the door just before they start cleaning up for the breakfast round. You look at her now and you see that. You wouldn’t believe it, but your world can change fast, kiddo. And you don’t wanna be like old Josephine.
So I didn't write a list yesterday. So what? Who cares? It doesn't mean what you think it means.
Here's a picture I took today with my new camera, which features controls and functions that I know nothing about. The photo is okay. It is a window.
For really awesome photos, check out this lovely blog: The 365 Photography Project. Emma, the author and photographer, is talented and adorable. And I am not. Poo woo.
1. It was like remembering, that coming-up of pink on the horizon. It was like a memory, rising and yawning, that coming-up of pink, stretching into an orange, a purple haze, glowing, like memories do. We could have been sitting dormant, sleeping perhaps, and then pleasantly, a flash. It was the emergence of light, coming-out of the dimness. It was a straightening of the spine. There was no need to talk, wordless thoughts and feelings floated up and in and around us, recalling what we had once known. The pink appeared and our memories echoed out into the morning. If there was beauty in the world, we would see it.
Our mother had died two weeks prior. After the funeral, we drove to the coast to show her the sunrise. She’d never been to the beach before. She’d never seen why people had once assumed you could sail and sail and drop right off the edge of the earth. With my feet sinking into the sand, it occurred to me that before we knew it our own mother had dropped off the edge of the earth.
Jonathon picked me up in morning, in his Mercedes—some late model, vintage is the word. I scoffed. Except for the funeral, we hadn’t seen each other in years. We had barely spoken. Somehow we had celebrated all those important dates—weddings, birthdays, Christmas—on different days. Our mother had spent her time to-ing and fro-ing between us, but we hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years. How time flies! How we become, when it could not possibly have been predicted, such adults—so independent! I scoffed because it wasn’t like him, the Mercedes.
I sat with my mother between my legs. It was uncomfortable, but I knew it would only defy the journey to stick her in the back, like a child, and exclude her from the grown-up conversation in front. After all, we wanted to talk to her. We wanted to know what it was like, now that it was over. When we arrived we put her up on the dashboard so she could see the sun. We told her about ourselves and eventually we must have fallen asleep, Jonathon with his head against the door, and me with my forehead on my arm on the dashboard, next to the urn.
We awoke what could have only been an hour or so later. The sun had pushed past the horizon and there were a few surfers down on the beach, heading into the water. We ate biscuits from a bag and I apologised about my messy habits. Jonathon laughed. He said he’d wanted children, but Sarah hadn’t. He said it was a regret. The crumbs are fine, he said. We were quiet after that, the car was getting warm. We wound down the windows and threw the remaining biscuits to the birds on the road. It’s fabulous here, isn’t it, Jonathon said. Why don’t we take her out? Why don’t we let her taste the air?
We pushed ourselves out of the car and didn’t bother to lock up. Jonathon guided me down to the sand with his arm loosely around my waist. I held the urn. We walked for a long while, it seems, and when we were far enough away from the surfers and the couples who had ventured out for a morning jaunt, we entered the water. We waited for the waves, and let her roll out with the tide.
i would like to have a tree from which words would fall in just the right order and all i would need to do is buy some glue and paste them into a scrapbook. in the meantime this blog will have to do.
