When we were kids (AM)

It's funny how there are things you do as kids that you just don't seem to do as adults. I don't mean like wanting to eat lollies all the time or riding around your backyard with your brother pretending you are astronauts. I know why you don't do that stuff. Kind of. Actually, I barely know why you don't want to play astronauts as an adult. I mean, I like to imagine things, sit around fantasising about some alternate life. Usually one where I have this great house and have friends over all the time for amazing dinners I make, one where I have this really fulfilling job that is not only super-fulling and lucrative but also requires me to wear wonderful clothes from time to time.* And maybe if I spent a few extra minutes in my head it would eventually lead to a fantasy about being an astronaut. I mean, that would probably be really fulfilling and pretty lucrative and maybe if you were at the top of your game you'd be invited to things where you can wear nice clothes. And I am not forgetting space. SPACE you guys! Being in space would rule.** The best thing! Anyway if having an imaginary life in your brain is good, why don't we play games about being astronauts and shit. Ok, I don't really get it at all.

But that isn't even what I am talking about. I'm talking about boring things that happened in childhood that don't happen now. Like shining shoes. In truth I barely did that as a child/teenager. But I remember Chickpea doing it. She went to a posh private school, while I went to the private school where drug dealers and kids expelled from all the fancy private schools went. I was neither a drug dealer nor expelled, mostly it was a question of geography and a realisation that we didn't belong in the posh private school. Yada yada yada, I rarely had to polish my shoes. But it seems like a thing from my youth. Check it out you guys, this week I polished some shoes. They are my favourite shoes, they are tan and great and really scuffed up and dirty now, so I polished them and they look great! I'm not going to show you a picture, because you don't know what they looked like before so you'll probably think the after photo is a before photo. But trust me guys, shoe polishing is great, just because you don't have a parent telling you to do it, doesn't mean you should forget about it.

How about going to the dentist. I used to do that all the time; when I was a child and my parents were responsible for my oral hygiene. Not now though. Probably hadn't been for about 5 years. Until this week! Now that I ma responsible for someone else's oral hygiene so I took our mouths into my hands and went to the dentist. I wish I could be as excited about this as the shoe polish. On the upside, my teeth were even cleaner than my shoes when I left the dentist. On the downside, dentists charge you hundreds of dollars for looking at your teeth and polishing them and finding holes they want to charge you heaps more money for filling. On the upside I feel better about myself as a citizen and a mother, so on the whole I guess going to the dentist was at least as rewarding as polishing my shoes.

I'm going to find some other activities of my youth that may benefit my life. Yeah!


*Shit, I have given way too much away about my inner life.
**I spent some time imagining my life as an astronaut at this point in the writing on the post, and guess what! It was awesome

Get out of my head tweeps (AM)

It took me a long time to get on Twitter and that is basically because I knew what would happen. I'd become hooked on it and get lost in that weird little world. That's not exactly what happened. Or at least not in an extreme way. I know that I don't really know Alec Baldwin (thank God. I mean, I love Jack Donaghy, but talk about self-righteous) or Ewan McGregor but when you spend a lot of time on Twitter things get weird.

On Monday while innocently listening to a podcast of a radio show from the US I heard an unannounced spoiler for Breaking Bad. I felt furious. Really furious. Blood boilingly. I don't know why exactly, but I did. And for some reason I wanted to tweet about it. I felt like it was the only way I could get over my fury. By telling David Bianculli of TV Worth Watching to go fuck himself and by telling Aaron Paul what had happened. I didn't. I kept it to myself. If you call telling K about it keeping it to myself. Which I do.

And something else is happening. People I follow keep appearing in my dreams. Yeah, I know. My mum recently was laughing at the fact that when I was little I used to dream about famous people all the time. I may have grown out of this if it weren't for this crazy world we live in. The other day Joseph Gordon-Levitt was up in that brain and then on Monday night Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari were in my dream.

Crazy thing was I only started following Aziz that very day! Why were Mindy and Aziz in my dream. Did my brain put them together because they are Indian? Nah, probs just because they are both funny. Right? Right brain? That's why you put them there? When I woke up from that dream I thought, "Boy, J, you really got to stop looking at Twitter before bed." At which point I fell back asleep and promptly had a dream about Breaking Bad starring Jesse Pinkman. You know, Aaron Paul, who I follow on Twitter.

The circle of life OR, as Des'ree would say, Life, oh life (PM)

I read old Miss Soft Crab posts all the time. I love it. Though it always makes me wish I edited them more carefully. Knowing I probably won't change though, please accept my apologies for all the times I screw up from now on. Especially the times I use the same word in two consecutive sentences, like an idiot.

I guess I know that my mind, like J's,  has about five tracks.  The same five tracks that it's been riding since it was teenaged. Sometimes I worry about it and think I should lay down some new tracks for this baby (points at brain zone of head) to ride. Of course, these thoughts are built in to the system under track 5. But then I get distracted by 1 to 4 and, well, you read Miss Soft Crab so you know what happens. I must say I feel  better about the whole thing now I have J's soothing graphic representation to work with. Did anyone else find those diagrams soothing and reassuring?





I've always thought that it looked more like this inside this (points at brain zone of head):
While not unpleasant, it's far from soothing, I think you'll agree.





Anyway: food, hunks, warmth, looking cute, appearing less shallow. This is how it is and this is how it always will be. Tim and Elton say it's the circle of life. It may also be the hippocampus. At any rate, I'm kind of reassured by the predictability of it all.

Just quickly before I go, I think the email subject "Karen sure knew what she was talking about" was in fact a reference to Karen Carpenter and her famous statement "rainy days and Mondays always get me down". I assume that email was written on a Monday. Does that ring a bell, Mate? Also, guess what outfit I'm wearing today, totally coincidentally. Yep, nondescript office girl. But without the scarf. Though it is a tad cold in my office, so I kind of wish I had the scarf.


NB: K brain drawing reproduced with kind permission of the artists, Chickpea and Baby, who I didn't actually ask but am pretty sure they'll be cool with it.

The circle of life (AM)

Sometimes in the pursuit of ideas, happiness, laughter, time-wastage/procrastination I reread old Miss Soft Crab posts. Yeah I love myself, what's it to ya? It's actually pretty interesting writing this blog, it makes me attuned to my patterns of thought in a way I never was before. I guess now that I write shit down and share it with more people than just K (that's you, our dear five readers) I pay more attention to my brain and also don't want to bore the shit out of you guys by banging on about the same old stuff all the time. Problem is though I pretty much have a five-track mind.

It turns out that I have no idea what this one-track metaphor relates to. Records? Roads? Or as someone on wiki.answers.com suggested train tracks? I guess that does make the most sense in a way, even though it didn't cross my mind. Anyway, hopefully this generic visual interpretation of my brain tracks gets the point across. If you chose an email that K and I wrote to each other on any normal day from the last 12 or so years that we've been emailing you would see that it pretty much jumps all those tracks. Probably it starts out with some pleasantries. Then It would move to what someone had for dinner or was thinking of having for lunch or dinner. Then it would move to what someone is wearing or some new piece of clothing one of us wants. Then, inevitably, hunks. We are nothing if not predictable. But you probably know that by now.

An email from last December, for example, with the subject line "Karen sure knew what she was talking about" for reasons I can not remember (Mate, can you help a sister out?) gives us the following excerpt:

J: Hi Mate. How are you today? I am fine thanks. I like my pants, but I hate that Gorman jumper i am wearing. I took it off in fact. Now I am wearing a t-shirt.

K: Hi Mate, I'm fine thanks too. How was your dinner last night? I had the round food for dinner again...I'm wearing a kit that can really only be described as nondescript office girl. It consists of black tights, a black dress, a black wrap around cardigan type deal and a beige scarf. #boringbutacceptable

J: Round food! Oh mate. My dinner was good, but pretty full on. There were three problems: [outline problems of cooking and eating fritto misto with aoili]. 

It's true that no hunks appear in this email, but this isn't a science.

Another thing I have noticed about my brain is that it is totally cyclical. In the major seasonal changes, that is winter to spring and summer to autumn I become obsessed with my look. On the weekend I bought Vogue. Basically I only buy fashion magazines at this seasonal change and its because of said obsession. I guess that after a season of being to totally dominated by the elements and all clothing choices being driven by practicality, the shoulder seasons of autumn and spring bring a very exciting liberation.The prospect of dressing for cuteness not just need.

The transition seasons also bring a lot of hope. And with that hope, broken dreams. In spring the delight of sunshine, dashed by rain and hail. In autumn thoughts of tweed jackets and red wine, dashed by the need for more bulk than tweed and more sleep than lots of red wine allows. I guess this is what Elton John and Tim Rice called the circle of life.

I once was blind (AM)

I don't want you guys to think I've got a one-track mind, but the arrival of Spring has made my goddamn year. Just four days of sunshine and I feel brand new. Or like a new release of a pre-existing model. Like my brain has emerged from hibernation. And I know there are more cold days ahead, but I'm sure they will be like water off the back of a duck to me now that I have seen the light (of spring)!

In the last four days I've thought of TWO brand new outfits using clothes I've had for ages. Clothes that have been sitting there in my cupboard and I have not thought to team because my brain has been mush. (The outfits, for those intimate with my wardrobe and curious or those in need of some AWESOME inspiration*, included pinky peach pleated pants with a pink shirt and a little jumper I like to call quilty tucked in, and a cream skivvy with pale denim skirt, burnt orange stockings and burnt orange boots. I looked so cute.)

Last night I made a dinner that was a variation of a meal I make plenty in warm weather but that I'd never quite made before. A brand new prawn marinating recipe sprung to my brain (ginger, mint, coriander, lime juice, pineapple juice).

I served the prawns with salad and coconut rice.

Then do you know what happened? I had left over coconut rice and I thought "what should I do with that?" I realised that probably if I fried it into little rice cakes, spread those with the salted caramel spread K made for chutney club and ate them with some fried bananas they'd probably be pretty effing delicious. Hopefully I will have confirmation on that that by the end of today.
 
Brain and spring, if you were horoscopes you'd be as compatible as Taurus and Virgo. If you filled out your profiles on e-harmony you would totally get match-made (I guess. If you believe the ads). Spring, you complete Brain.

If these last four days are anything to go on I'm going to be having great ideas out the wazoo for the next few months! So stay tuned readers!!!**


*This is included pretty much for K only. I know she will care.
**I really hope that my fingers aren't writing cheques my butt can't cash

Friday Favourites: Damon Albarn (PM)

What K says is true. But my mind track looks more like this:
*blllluuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh*
*Blur!*
*Damon Albarn! = destination reached!*

Damon Albarn is the bomb. I love Blur so much! Also I love the Gorillaz! And while that Dr. Dee opera is kind of weird, you gotta respect a man that wants to writes an opera about some old skool mathematician/astronomer/astrologer who straddled the worlds of science and magic and whose thirst for the occult led to his downfall, and then just does it.

Also did you know that Damon Albarn's girlfriend/mother of his child, Suzi Winstanley, is an artist who makes collaborative paintings and photographs with her artistic partner, which I don't really get but think is kind of great. All their work is about nature and they have quite a few wolf works, so, you know, I kind of love them. I know that doesn't really have anything to do with Damon but I guess it's just a positive association.

I know it's Friday and usually I'd like to play a party song to get y'all in the mood but I'm afraid I can't go past 'No distance left to run' for my Blur pick. I just think it's a really beautiful, sad song. I love the tired feel of it. Like he really can do no more. I pretty much think it's genius.

Damon Albarn, you really are an everyday favourite. That doesn't really have the ring of Friday Favourite, but I bet you could make it work.

You're not doing it right, brain! (AM)

Hey! Guys! How was everyone's weekend? Mine was pretty good thanks.

When I woke up on Sunday morning I was really excited about a post I was going to write for you. It was early and I was just waking up and remembering how earlier in the weekend I'd been taking notes in my Miss Soft Crab notebook and been really excited about this thing that had happened. For you guys. But you know, it was early so I had to think about the weekend to figure out what it was. And then it came to me.

The night before I had been sitting in a room, this really non-descript room and a friend was sitting next to me and a bunch of guys walked in and I realised one of them was Donnie Wahlberg! I know! Marky Mark's brother! I love Marky Mark! And I said to my friend, "Gee Donnie Wahlberg looks really sad." And then the guy in front of me turned around and it was Danny from New Kids on the Block! And it turned out that the non-descript room I was in was about to be the venue for a NKOTB show and we were just sitting right there by the stage! Anyway, Danny from NKOTB said, "Yeah, Donnie's just been two-timed on." Then he laughed like it was really funny and told me that Donnie was hanging out with one of the dancers but he was still really sad. And THAT is when I took out my special notebook, because I could not fucking believe what was going on and that I would have such a good post for you guys today. All this inside gossip on New Kids on the Block that Danny NKOTB seemed to be throwing around so freely! Sure, who gives a shit about those guys, right? Not me, but what a great story!

I guess you see where this is going. When I remembered all these details on Sunday morning it eventually dawned on me that my great experience had been a dream and I'd have fuck all for you guys today.

The weird thing is that when I was young and NKOTB were big I didn't even like them. I NEVER EVEN LIKED THEM! When I saw they were touring here earlier this year with the Backstreet Boys, the only thoughts I had about it were "Ha! NKOTBSB!" and "Weren't those bands hot, like, 10 years apart? Surely there is no cross-over fan base." That is all you guys. Those are the only thoughts I had. And then I had a dream about them. Perhaps I shouldn't be putting this out there like that. Perhaps it says more about my subconscious than I should be admitting.

The only explanation I can think of is that Marky Mark is never too far from my subconscious, but being a subconscious and all, it's tricky about how it works so it sent me Donnie Wahlberg instead. Also, I ate a fair bit of cheese on Saturday.

Thanks for nothing, subconscious.

Haiku Thursday (AM)

Don't fail me now memory

I 

What's that thing where you

Cut apple, batter and fry,

Then dip in toffee?

II

Distant memory

Wait! Chinese toffee apple!

I'm gonna make you

III

Remembering that

Was easy, now remember

Other cool stuff, brain!