Happy birthday to my boss

Today we had cake and champagne in the office for my boss, whose birthday is tomorrow but he's going to be out of the office so we organised it for today. I organised it all, actually, sent emails around to all the staff and collected money and chose the cake and the champagne, ducked out and got it all at lunch today and set up the little plastic champagne flutes I had bought yesterday, and celebrated him and his birthday with the office. I had to do it all myself because our office manager and surrogate mother is taking four days off because her husband is travelling and she has two teenaged kids at home. And I'm the 2IC in the office now that the more senior project manager left. And he's had a tendency lately to hire shy, retiring, quiet folks who wouldn't be moved to do it all themselves. So it was down to me, and I did it, and it came off nicely - I think he was surprised, and I think he was pleased.

I love my boss. He drives me crazy, but he's also a genius, and beyond that, he understands me. He's very smart and funny, cynical but with a warm heart. When he gets stressy he starts doing everything too fast and he stutters and doesn't make any sense. Just like me! He's a Gemini, just like me (duh, if his birthday is tomorrow). He whirrs around in tight hummingbird circles and is a junky for stress and tight deadlines and doing a thousand things at once, just like me. And he understands me! He wasn't scared off my the PhD in Philosophy on my resume, he's actually attracted to things like that in an employee. He forgives my red eyes and croaky voice and sniffles and fuzzy hair in the morning when I haven't had enough coffee and I've walked to work through the humidity and plane tree pollen. And he forgives me when I get stressy and stutter and don't make any sense. And he tells me I have good ideas, and gives me things when they need some word-smithery, and he takes my suggestions, at least the good ones, as isn't alpha-male about it at all. He really isn't alpha-male to me at all, which is remarkable and wonderful. He has a great mother and an accomplished sister and so I think he's used to smart women and likes being around them. I appreciate that so much! He's my perfect boss, in some ways, even though he makes me crazy and we always have too much to do and he doesn't pay me enough. The first page of the Economics textbook says that the value of a job isn't calculated just on the basis of monetary remuneration - all the value of it to you goes under the curve there, and the fact that I can be myself and appreciated for it, and that he's a genius and funny and with a warm heart, and the greatness of the office and all the other people I work with, I love all of that and it all has value for me.

Happy birthday, boss.

And I'm glad you liked the cake.

Holding hands

So then last night I had a dream with one of my co-workers in it, actually the very most annoying and uncooperative one, once he even made me cry at work with frustration, but we'd been in a meeting together the day before and he does have a kind of goblin-like attractiveness about him that I've always noticed, and somehow last night it was him in my dream. We were going to a movie or someplace, and we were walking together and he took my hand, and we held hands. And then he had his arm around me in a very comfortable, cuddly way, and we stayed like that for a while, and I remember very specifically his arm around me and I turned and kissed three little kisses on the inside of his wrist. I think it was probably a specific memory of a specific occasion with someone else's wrist. I felt all warm and cuddly today, and fortunately didn't have to talk to the co-worker at all until nearly 6pm so there wasn't too much work-weirdness, that inevitable awkwardness of the next day after you've had a dream about someone and then have to interact with them in real life. It wasn't at all an erotic dream, it was a romantic dream. Those are the ones I've been having, and that's more what I'm after in life anyway. All the hand-holding, arm-around, cuddly stuff. But you should watch who you want to do it with -- all that stuff is heaps more meaningful than flat-out ordinary brute penis-vagina sex. And so can be much more confusing for people. So you should watch who you want to do it with. And my subconscious knew that, because my last thought at the end of the dream was, "But, wait a minute, what about Liz?" His long-term, live-in girlfriend. Yeah, subconsicous, what about her? Why are you dreaming all these strange cuddly dreams?

I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night*

I started this blog, originally, to whinge about my broken heart, and although I haven't been moved to do that very much recently, today I will.

I've been having dreams about reconciliation. While I was away I had a series of them, night after night. I think I even felt, like, "No, this isn't right. I can't just accept this, him coming back to me, after all this." But I did. In the dreams he was just there, moved back, come back to me, and took up matter of factly as part of my life again. He came back, not even nicely, just matter-of-factly, or in some of the dreams sort of bullying, but I didn't say no to him because it's where he belongs, he should be back, I guess I still want him back.

I do believe in soul mates and one true loves. I always did, and when I met him I knew I had found mine, and I guess I still believe he is mine. I hope I do not always believe this and when my real one true love comes along it will put the whole experience in shadows so deep that he will, rightly, seem like the no-good edgy guy you live with for a while in your youth before you grow up and can actually form an adult relationship and commit and be married and really love. But, right now, he's it. In my dreams. In my sleeping unconscious.

The dream woke me up, because my waking self finds it easier to say, no, this isn't right, I don't have to accept this, I can say no, you can't come back, you can't just come back, after what you've done, after all this hurt and pain and letting me down, even the very beginning of the letting me down when I needed you would disqualify you from ever getting considered as even a candidate for being my boyfriend ever again. Not to mention that my sister would have you killed. My waking self finds it easier to think these things, and after I woke up today I repeated them to myself over breakfast, in the shower, trying to melt the thought down into the layers of brain so that in my dreams too I'll be able to turn and tell him, tell him no, you can't just come back, it isn't right, not after what you did, I won't have you, I don't want you.

But I do. I want him back. I hope I do not always want him back.

So today, with the lingering emotional residue of the dream still on me, then suddenly all the sensory details of the whole thing came back to me. Not just sensory, the emotional details. I walked up Oxford St to get a book for Book Club, and walking back I passed all sorts of spots where we had been together, and I saw lots of men walking in the shadows of evening who were sort of the same height as him, sort of in clothes he would wear, sort of the same kind of hair. I not only remembered what he looked like, walking, in the distance, when we were supposed to meet and I would walk up to him, I remembered what it felt like. The emotion of being with him, of being together, connected, part of a whole, him mine, me wholly his, so thoroughly, and so fucking long, ten fucking years, no wonder it's saturated in all the dreamy parts of my brain and won't come out.

The memories, today, were all so vivid, and there were so many of them. Rich texture, and all that. So close, so present. I hadn't felt this way in ages and ages and ages. I guess I have been pushing the memories down, and blanking the feelings, so that I can imagine that it's 20 years from now and I feel only wistful nostalgia. But today the rich detail of it was all coming back to me, triggered by all the places around here, and I don't like it and I want it to stop.

My counsellor lady told me very early on that the last stage of grief is when you can think back on it and remember the memories happily, and value the experience because it made you who you are today. You can remember the memories and not feel the pain of their loss, and the anguish that they are just memories and not in the now. So maybe, praise Jesus, maybe the reason I'm having all these dreams and these sensations of memory is that the scars are finally healed enough that I can dig down and uncover all that stuff, safely. The wounds are healed over enough that my brain can present the memories to itself and not explode in pain. Maybe. And so once they are opened up and they fly out like ghosts from a box, maybe what will be left will be those memories without all the emotion, the appreciation of the value of the experience without all the pain. Maybe. I hope so.

But it's kind of weird in the meantime.

*title of a song by the Electric Prunes, from the first Nuggets album, and the theme song for my radio show at college.

First poem for class

The Lettuce of Optimism

I wake at 8 not 7, late. I must
work 8 not 7 hours, I am
late, I will not get home till 8 or 7.

Can I make a sandwich?

I open my white fridge and see colours, bulbs
of red, orange, yellow bursting out, abundant.

And from shelf to top the space is filled with bursting green.
A living butter lettuce, green life pulsing from its living roots.

When I bought this lettuce I believed I could make lunch
and feed myself, frugally and beautifully.

In honour to the lettuce I make a colourful sandwich.

I work 6:15 hours.

Landlords

I've been renting this place for just over 18 months now. When I moved in it came with a dryer, but I brought my own better one so I moved the old one out onto the balcony and there it has sat, under a plastic wrap, until now. Also, I set up a PO box because the mailboxes out front are quite exposed to street pedestrian traffic, so the only mail that comes there is for the landlords. I have to collect that mail and take it around the corner to another box, I guess managed by the Body Corporate, and I don't do it very often but try to every month or so. I had formed a mental picture of the landlords. I imagined they must be a couple middle-aged or older, to own an investment property. They have the same last name. The mail comes from a bank, a home loan company, some art galleries, and lots of beauty shops and spas for the Mrs. I imagined them like the couples you see on travel ads, or maybe denture ads, attractive and well-dressed but grey-haired and enjoying the twilight of life.

When they asked me to sign a new lease recently, I decided to negotiate the dryer, because it was ugly sitting outside, but more because I was afraid it was being destroyed in the weather and I'd have to pay to replace it when I moved out. Whenever that will be. So I asked if they would please take it away, and they agreed. My rental agent, Lisa (from her voice the name "Lisa" has a little heart above the i) rang this week and said they'd come by today between 4 and 5.

The bell rang at about 4:30 and I opened the door, and saw two little kids on my steps. "Ellen?" the Mr. said. "I'm Stephen, and this is Cassandra." They looked about 25. They were both in weekend sweatpants and t-shirts, and she had her hair in a ponytail pulled away from her sweet round face. These were my landlords? How could they own property? They probably just learned to sign their names in cursive a week ago!

Cassandra said, "Wow, this is weird," and then I felt for her - this was probably a place they lived when they were very first married, and then they moved up and on and decided it was sensible to collect rent on it - my rent. I said, "You probably haven't been here for a while, have you? Come through!" I'm sure with my very eccentric stuff inside, the place looked absolutely nothing like their honeymoon dwelling, and it probably exorcised any weirdness for her - this is now the home of an eccentric middle-aged divorced lady, and they have moved on to their new life.

I went to move things out of the way but ended up getting in the way myself, because Stephen had hoisted the dryer up and was strolling by with it. Startling. I have lived now so long with my own dimensions and my own relationship to the physical world that it was startling to see a tall young man who could lift heavy things. Haven't had one of those in my life for a while now.

Yes, I did feel a little pang from that, and from knowing that they have the same last name and lived here together once. And that they're 25 and own real estate already.

But, more broadly, it's nice to have met the landlords as human people, and I might resent paying the rent a bit less having met them face to face.

Poetry class

So now I'm taking a poetry class. My friend cajoled me into signing up, because her cousin is teaching it and she was afraid it wouldn't run from having too few students, and also she has a student in it who's working on a suite of poems and needed some feedback. I was a bit dubious because I have a history of not really "getting" poems, and I didn't write anything before my first class because I didn't know what I could subject the group of strangers to, but I went to my first one on Monday (missed the first two because I was away), and it was really fun! I do of course know the basics of rhyme, rhythm, assonance, consonance, etc. - all those hours studying for the AP English test weren't completely lost on me, you know. And I have a good enough eye and ear so when the teacher puts an example in front of you, you can sort of work out what's good about it. And at least one in the class hasn't got the hang of "show don't tell", so I won't be the most hopeless one there, although I anticipate being somewhat hopeless because everyone's either retired or in high school, no one else has the commitment of a full-time job like me so they will be able to spend lots more time.*

We read two poems that were really good, and I highly recommend checking them out. One is a famous one called "Question" by May Swenson, which is the second one on this page:
http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/reading/swenson/swen-sloan.html

And the other one was a Poem of the Day recently from poets.org, and is just a cracker: "In Michael Robins’s class minus one" by Bob Hicok, hot off the press in January of this year:
http://www.poets.org/sponsor-book-profile.php/prmBookID/343/prmSponsorID/152

You might notice a theme in both of these poems, and in fact that theme ran through ever poem on the night, including the six student works we read - yep, all poems are about death. I'm going to see if I can write some that aren't, and I'll post my attempts here (so you can criticise and give me tips if you want to), but maybe for something as arty and emotional as poetry, death is the only subject big enough for it?

More as it happens!

(Oh but btw I haven't forgot about opera - was on the Opera Australia site today and wishing I had $2000 spare so I could subscribe to the season that starts in June!)

*On time, it's been feeling really scarce lately, just like money, and like money I'm sure I actually have plenty of it, I'm just not being sensible with it. Since I got home I've been in a state where I can't seem to motivate myself to get anything done - even dishes, laundry, getting up and turning off the tv, etc. Am I depressed? Maybe. But more likely I've still got jet-lag - I've only been home for one week - and I will feel back to normal soon.

Things about the trip there

• Spicks and Specks on TV in the terminal while waiting for the plane - but only on the TV in the kid's area, so had to sit on a bright blue and red stained couch to watch it. Made me homesick in advance, though.
• Saw both of the Navigator banners that we did for AFR on the display in the terminal - much bigger in person, and they're right, the AFR logo that displays at the end isn't on the screen for long enough.
• Was able to satify my gyoza thing at the Wagamama in the terminal - noodles, at the airport, for dinner! Amazing. But after you order they give you a number to put on your table and he tried to give me number 13 - no, I don't think so, not before a long plane journey, I'd like another number please! So I ended up number 45.
• I thought it was brilliant that they could check my bags all the way through to Denver, since the Dallas-Denver leg was on a different reservation. I tried to express my surprise and gratitude to the Qantas check-in agent but he was all business and stuck to his script. (This will turn out to be ironic given what happened on the way back.)
• When I got on the plane the muzak was Four Seasons in One Day from She Will Have Her Way. Still amazes me living in a country that can have ambient Neil Finn, after him being our own little secret for so long.

Narita

• Shiseido counter had a huge poster advertising face-whitening cream. I still find this whole concept shockingly racist and discriminatory. I was there before all the shops opened so was able to watch all the uniformed worker ladies arrive, and you could tell which ones use face-whitening cream and which don't - the artificially whiteners all looked sort of blue and sickly, like someone who has had a very bad flu for a while. Beauty, huh?
• I finally decided to try out the buttons on the toilet. The one with the little musical notes doesn't actually play music, it just plays a recording of a flushing sound, to mask other sounds you might be making (like maybe laugher?). Mystery of the Japanese musical toilets solved!
• The main place to eat was called "Bowl Bowl". I love that. The first "bowl" is for the thing that all the food comes in, since it was mainly a noodle place. I think the second was the sort of Americanised word that just means "place", like from 50's diners and things.
• I had planned to kill time watching a movie in the video room, of which I have found memories from my first trip through Narita which must have been in 1998. This was a place where you could pay about $5 US and sit in a comfy black chair and watch a movie on your own screen, with speakers built into the sides of the chair by your head. There was a sign downstairs for the video room, but it didn't appear on the "You are here" maps of the terminal upstairs, and the little worker folks hadn't ever heard of such a thing before - guess because they were only 9 last time I came through town they might not have seen it before. I think the video room had turned into the...
• Yahoo! internet room. Gorgeous, clean room full of computers on big tables, and a big window with a view to the planes outside. Between each machine was some notepaper in a pastel plastic clip with a fanciful shape, and beside that was a little bonzai palm tree in a pretty glass bowl.
• The character for "passenger" is the character for "person" inside a box!
• There was a girl on my plane with a shirt that should be on Engrish.com. I didn't see everything that was on the back, but the front said, in big black letters, "Royality Crown". Sometimes when you're in Japan you feel a bit like you're losing your grip on royality, so I was glad to see the shirt...

American Airlines, Tokyo-Dallas

• There was a group of four or five young men who were quite striking - black, all pretty tall, dressed flambouyantly in black and white, bling, expensive shoes, loud white jackets. A rap band? Dancers? Karate champions? One of them was supposed to sit by me - really tall black kid but with a dancer's languidness to his movements, white leather jacket, black jeans slung low, white framed sunglasses worn backwards on the back of his head, hair up about a foot in an afro, and a white band around his head with japanese characters and a bit red sun and the whole bit. He was nice, smiley, sort of a flirt, but quite vague, and didn't really respond to questions in the way you'd expect, he just sort of looked. He was after one of the rows of seats in the middle, and the hosties actually helped him find one with three seats in a row, which was good for me because then I got my two seats on the side all to myself. He responded kind of vaguely to them as well, in fact one even asked, "Are you alright?" I thought they must be Dallas B-Boys headed back home from something or other. However, when we arrived, they all went in the line for non-US citizens. And I thought - maybe he's Japanese! Maybe he was so vague because he doesn't actually have much English. Very strange to have a tall black kid in hip-hop clothes be Japanese, but hey, it's a big world. And Japanese B-Boys dress flambouyantly just like these black guys did. It could also be, though, that he was vague because he was smacked out on something - he slept the whole, whole trip, 11 hours long - or maybe he was just a little stupid. I guess we will never know.
• Feeling on the plane as we started passing over the continental US and I could see the names of American places on the map with the little airplane - the exquisite sadness of the expat experience - both places are home, so you always miss someplace no matter where you are.
• But in some ways I have been away too long - when I asked the hostie about the rules about liquids on domestic flights, she said, "It's the same, you have your little three ounces..." And I looked at her completely blankly, thinking, "Three? What? Ounces? How the heck much is that?" 100 mls, baby, that's how big the little bottles are!