The perfect machine

As part of my quest to get back on the football field next season I have returned to the classes in the surfclub or what is known locally as ‘Block-Chi’. (The classes are run by a bloke nicknamed ‘Blockhead’, don’t ask me why they’re called ‘Chi’ because they are far more violent than any idea of Tai-Chi I have). I attempted the classes last year and ended up in this. This time I have eased into it with a lot of prepartory swimming and stationary bike work. This got my fitness to a decent level before I even tried to approach the dance-floor of doom that is Block-Chi.

A few weeks ago Block was showing me how to use the rowing machine. He felt that I had been ‘bludging’, which is probably true. I walked in and he was stretching his legs on the bar, his left leg well above the horizontal with his head resting on his knee.

“Hey Block”
“GEORGIE! Rowing machine. 200. First 100, 35. Second 50, 38. Last 50, you can wind it back a bit.”

I just looked at him incredulously and absent-mindedly rubbed my pectoral muscle.

“Hang, on I’ll show you.”

He guided me down the hall toward the ancient, rusting gym equipment.

“Flexing at me are ya? Feeling ya muscles?” He laughed at how ridiculous this obviously was and the joke he made.

He walked just behind me. I could tell he had already worked up a sweat from the heat he was emanating.

“Pull in yer guts. C’mon” he said softly. I tried to pull the guts in.

“Stick yer tits out. Don’t be afraid a havin’ big tits.” He touched me lightly between the shoulder blades. “We’re gonna work at getting rid of THAT”. He was referring to the stoop in my back, developed over years of slouching to hide, yes, big tits.

He continued, without waiting for any kind of disagreement from me.

“C’mon, I know what yer doin’. What all women do. Hiding. Always checkin’ if everythin is alright. Now get on the machine”.

He had seen right through me. Seen right through the tights that were not skin tight and always black. Seen past the long, fitted singlets that I wear under everything to smooth out the creases and hide the muffin top. He has seen through my discomfort with women fitter and leaner than me, even though they are significantly older and have had more children. Women like his wife who watched me in the mirror last week as I laboured through 200 on the rowing machine. She laid on a bench and lifted weights at a measured and disciplined speed. I wasn’t scared or worried about her. I just wondered why she can look the way she does and I look like I do. A barrel on fat legs. She is always friendly towards me and never misses a chance to encourage me. She calls me ‘Darlin’. I suspect she doesn’t remember my name. Her gaze made sure I didn’t quit early even though I knew she couldn’t possibly be counting.

I sat down and Block squatted next to me.

“Grab the handles and pull. Go ON”.

I pulled it with more of a struggle than I expected.

“Ugh. That’s heavier than last week”.

He got up and adjusted something and the tension eased off a bit. I pulled the handle and began sliding backward and forward on the little seat a few times while he observed.

“Don’t hit yourself in your guts. It’s in the front part of the foot, getting yer arse back and forward. Use your legs”. He stood and watched a couple more pulls. “This machine is perfect,” he said as if he were looking at a Ferrari rather than an old rower that has seen better days, “perfect for taking you wherever you want to be”. I believed him.

“200, don’t go over 35”. Something made him revise down his estimation of my ability. “And don’t slack off. By the time you come out of here I want to see you red in the face, puffing and blowing”.

I go through my 200. I imagine this machine taking me where I want to be, back on to the field. I imagine myself using the guile gained through 20 plus years of football to fool women half my age. I imagine the ball coming off my foot and curling into the top corner of the net. I get to the end of the 200 and I can’t imagine any more, only focus on my face in the mirror above the machine. I am red and breathing hard, grimacing on each pull but I feel ok. Slightly dizzy but not nauseous. I guess this is probably enough.

After the rowing I walked out of the small gym to the large room with the dancefloor, had a sip of my water and tried to catch my breath before Blockhead saw I was finished and gave me more orders. The rest of the class were skipping, hard, to Jet’s Cold Hard B***h. Due to my stress fracture I can’t skip or do any of the more bouncy routines Block takes us through. I run up and down the stairs or I spend a lot of time marching up and down on the spot, lifting my knees high and pumping my arms into the air. I’ve now started to use weights while doing this. I’m sure people who come to the class and haven’t seen me before must think I’m some dork and a fat one at that. I don’t give a shit about people like that. We’re all at the same level in Block’s class. There is no one who is better than anyone else, we all get the same treatment: a stern talking to when we’re bludging and a gentle ‘good girl’ when we’re trying, even if we’re getting it wrong. Small, genuine mistakes are forgiven, laziness is never tolerated.

I left class that night feeling strangely deflated. I didn’t bounce out the door feeling like I could jog home. I felt like someone had given me a firm but gentle punch to guts. I felt found out. The novelty of the class had been punctured, I looked ahead and saw only months of hard work.

HE’S a fan

Sticker on car at Toormina

I’ve been tooling about, trying to write something about football and my (perhaps very misguided) decision to get myself fit so I can get back on the field next season. As part of this I’ve been thinking about why I like football, and sport in general, so much and why not many people I know can understand this. Of course, there are men I know who totally get football and they fully understand why I like it, even while questioning, I suspect, whether a woman can really get football. There are a whole lot of others though who are openly confused and slightly put out by my obsession and I am continually feeling apologetic for allowing something as barbaric as sport play a large part of my life. The message is: in the scheme of things sport should be allowed to provide only a small amount of meaning to one’s life. It is merely a set of games intended to amuse.

I feel apologetic about my sport but at the same time I feel inferior in my obsession, when compared to men. I feel I need to make up for being a woman by taking it very seriously. I need to be sure of my facts and always admit when wrong. I never try to make out I know more than I do because I suspect I will always be found out. (However, I am not afraid of telling a bloke he doesn’t know what he is talking about and once got into a mild argument with a man at the Spanish Club in Sydney over how much Chelsea paid for Chris Sutton when he moved from Blackburn. It was 10 million, I was right).

The other day I read a review of two books about football fans and noticed this:

“For me, the study of diehard fans is essentially about men. I don’t mean that women’s stories are uninteresting, or that their fandom is any less valid…But there is a way that men support their clubs that speaks more powerfully to their behaviour in other spheres.”

At first I thought, what tosh, women can be just as loony as men! Of course they can be serious fans. Of course their fandom speaks volumes about the rest of their lives!  A MAN has written the review hasn’t he? I started thinking about it and thought perhaps there was a bit of truth in that. I love football, I love my various teams, from the local club to the overseas club I follow  but if they lose, my life will not be ruined. I do not fall into a deep depression. I get annoyed, yes, but I am usually distracted by other things closer to home soon enough. Like the dishes. Or ironing the school shirts. I was mightily pissed off when we lost the Ashes and I could appreciate the ‘cultural’ significance of it and enjoyed the tactical discussion of each Test but I was not about to allow some gloating Poms to ruin my day. (And besides, the Australian cricket team is in a ‘rebuilding’ phase, just like our rugby team, so these losses are feeding future triumphs). I enjoyed watching the Ashes while it was on but when it was finished I didn’t mourn the loss or the end of the series.

I don’t know whether I allow myself to be distracted because it provides a defense against sport-induced depression or because I know it just DOESN’T REALLY MATTER. Anecdotal evidence gathered through discussion with a very small amount of women points to a prevailing opinion that sport can be interesting and that it plays an important if somewhat over-emphasised role in society but that, as a football manager might say, at the end of the day, there are much larger things in life. (I could compare its role and importance to art or literature here but I am not going to do that right at this point in time because I will be here for a long time and I want to post this today). Women are fans, they enjoy football and can be fanatical but is there something in them that doesn’t allow them to get to the same point as men, simply by virtue of them being women or because sport doesn’t act as an extension of their role in society or how they see themselves?

I can’t really provide any answers to that right now but I can try to put my finger on how I like to see my obsession with football: as a semi-intellectual engagement with a seemingly meaningless but major part of our culture. Football, (and sport), is kind of like this:

“Football is the love of form. A spectacle that scarcely leaves a trace in the memory and does not enrich or impoverish knowledge. This is its appeal : it is exciting and empty.”
Mario Vargas Llosa

Maybe I like it precisely because it DOESN’T mean anything.

The Santa theory

This made me giggle.

Having a five year old son, Christmas is a BIG DEAL.  In the past week we have witnessed the ceremonial turning-on-of-the-town-Christmas-lights (performed by Santa, the Rabbitohs, and the Mayor), we have tried to get close to Santa and some real reindeer, only to be caught up in a marauding mob (same night as the lights event) and we have gone to the local shopping centre in the hope of getting a personal audience with Santa, including the obligatory rip-off photo.

Thankfully the personal audience was granted on Saturday. For Dash and his cousin of the same age it was a rather momentous event. I think Dash felt that if he didn’t get a message to Santa somehow, he would not get what he wanted for Christmas. His cousin refuses to tell anyone what she requested from Santa, we think she’s trying to test the theory of ‘Santa’ once and for all.

And that testing of the ‘Santa’ theory has been the hardest part for us adults. I suspect this may be the last year Dash actually believes in Santa and I was determined to milk it for all it was worth. Dash though is a stickler for FACTS. His cousin never likes to feel like one has been put over her. She will be doing the putting-over thank you very much. Hence, after seeing Santa and two REAL LIVE reindeer we had to deal with:

Child 1: Why were there only two reindeers? Two reindeers couldn’t pull a sleigh.
Child 2: Yes, how do they get it up in the sky?
Adult: Well, there’s more reindeer, he just brought two tonight.
Child 1: Why didn’t he bring more?
Adult: Well one just had a baby so the mother was home resting for Christmas with her baby (this was actually true. Well, the baby bit).
Child 1 : But Santa’s supposed to have SIX WHITE BOOMERS in Australia! Why did he have reindeers?
Child 2: What? Boomers? What?
Child 1: That song. Santa has white boomers because the reindeers just can’t stand the heat.
Adult: I think he uses both.
Child 2: Well, that would be expensive. How much do you think that would cost? To buy reindeers AND white boomers?
Adult: I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him when you see him next?
Child 2: I’M not going to ask him about his BUSINESS! That’s rude! You can’t ask someone about their business.
Adult: Well, you asked me! I don’t know how much it would cost!

And on and on.

We’re digging a very deep hole and it’s getting harder and harder to use the ‘it’s just magic’ excuse.

They’re suspicious but they don’t want to be proven wrong.

I guess we’re all like that in our own way.

Dash as Icarus

“In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
Bur for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

That’s Auden. The picture is by my Mum.

Thanks to a wonderful high school English teacher, as soon as I saw that photo those words came into my head.

Every city, every town…

…should have a public liiberrryyyy

Go the lovely people of Colac. I hope you get your library.

Via Alien Onion and Read Alert.

Pre-reading loves

There’s a wonderful little item over at the Guardian: What were your favourite books before you could read? As is pointed out: the bookish often rhapsodise over books that we loved as child readers, but the books we loved before we could read, and the reasons why we loved them, are not always so discussed.

Since having a child (who thankfully and rather unsurprisingly is a book child) I’ve read books to him that I was read and sometimes the familiarity of the images hits me like the proverbial ton of. They evoke a strange feeling of having been to a place before but not quite being able to put my finger on where it is. I can’t remember being read the books and sometimes can’t remember the story but the images are like that familiar but forgotten place and sometimes there’s a feeling that goes along with it. Sometimes it’s comfortable, sometimes it’s not.

I felt this rather acutely with, of all things,  Tootle. It’s not an especially literary book. It has an obvious and cumbersome message – stay on the tracks, no matter what. I don’t remember who read it to me and I can’t recall ever asking for it but when I read it to my son the pictures of the people waving red flags from behind shrubs were as familiar as my childhood bedroom, the road between the towns where I grew up, the voices of family members not heard for years. It would never be a book I would nominate as being a ‘favourite’ and I can’t imagine actually seeking it out to read once I could piece the words together myself.  It was the familiarity that told me I must have studied it closely as a child. It must have been a feature of that stage before I could read at all.

My son is just learning to read. He’s getting there. It’s a point of painful joy for me. He doesn’t seem to be taking to it as quickly as I remembered (true or not) doing so myself. I get frustrated with his seeming refusal to read words I know he recognises. He asks me the most complex questions at other times, he explains difficult concepts to me. He works stuff out: he observes, makes inferences, solves. But sometimes he refuses to read. It’s like there’s a block. And yet…I know he is learning it. He explained to me how he  and his cousin worked out that our number plate read ‘New South Wales’.

“We sounded out w-a-l-e-s and then we said ‘wales!’ and then I said ‘what goes with wales’ and we looked at the other words and I said ‘new south wales!’ and we worked it out!”

We rode down the street on our bikes after this and I heard him saying to the wind “I can read. New South Wales! I can read!”

I wanted to cry.

So, back to the books. A basic list of stuff that was around in my brain before I could read would be

1. The Brickstreet Boys (and others in the series)
Very difficult to get hold of these days. It’s quite legendary in our family. (We often argue as to who has the family copies, for they have been missing for years). They played football. There was a boy called Fred who you knew would be a pain in the arse at school but that there would be redemption for him. And it gave me the word ‘plimsolls’, a word I  turn over fondly in my mind to this day.

2. John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat
I had a deep dislike of this book but it plays a major part in my childhood because of how it made me feel. I won a hardcover copy in a Library Week painting competition when I was 5. It depressed me deeply. It made me feel hopeless, helpless and maudlin. I don’t know if it was the drawings or the limited and closed extent of the characters’ lives. I still feel hollow and sad when I think of it now. I still have the book and I don’t think I ever read it to my son, until he brought it home from the library.

3. Badjelly the Witch
This book scared the shit out of me. The drawings are done in ink and are black and white. The words are in curly handwriting rather than print and that somehow added to the fear. Opening it now I only have to see particular parts of particular pages and I feel sick in the stomach.

4. No Roses for Harry
The pattern of that rose-covered jumper may as well have been for me, so familiar is it.  The drawings now seem very 50s and old-fashioned but I never noticed this at the time. I wonder how much kids notice things that are out-of-date, or obsolete? Like the phone with the curly cord in a book I read Dash the other night. I wondered if he noticed the phone was attached to the wall. How quaint.

Like Tootle, I know there are a number of books that I can’t recall but when I see the images or hear certain sentences, it will suddenly rush back up at me. I only discover them when I read them for my son. I do enjoy the feeling they give me. They provide me with unconscious and spontaneous memories, like a secret tunnel back to my childhood. The brilliant thing about it is that it requires no effort from me. The pictures evoke the memories whether I like it or not and it’s not facts and places and times that I remember but feelings. Recalling a place or an event just doesn’t seem to have the same resonance somehow. Reason #387 why you should read books.

It’s a bookish meme

A book meme, via Laura, Pavlov’s Cat and Sterne. My post will be far less impressive and humorous than any of those but there you go.

What was the last book you bought?
The Gift of Speed by Steven Carroll. It was the day the Booker was announced and I had originally gone to the only-half-decent-bookshop-in-town to buy the winner but couldn’t bring myself to pay $35 for a paperback. Call me tight. All the books on the shortlist were a good $5-$10 more expensive than the average PB price. It was a rort. Anyway, I am happy with my investment so far.

Name a book you have read MORE than once
All my books are still packed in boxes AND LibraryThing is down so I don’t have the shelves to peruse to jog my memory. So, The Secret History, The Thin Man, The Children’s Bach, Monkey’s Mask, The Reader, Fredy Neptune, the Deidre Bair biog of Simone de Beauvoir…

Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it?
I agree with Tim, it’s hard to point to a book changing one’s life immediately but there is a great feeling of things changing over time. Some things are whittled away, other things become more complex. It’s why I read books and why I can not live without them.

How do you choose a book? e.g. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews?
Usually a recommendation, or a review, or an award, or some controversy. In other words: I have no idea.

Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction?
It depends. I honestly tend to sway between the two. I usually will be reading a bit of both. As I get older, and realise how much time I spend in front of a screen, I am tending towards fiction. I don’t know how those two facts are related. I think I feel in need of a total escape from the laptop sometimes. I work on computers, I build websites, I critique websites, I write about them (sometimes). I still consider myself a book person at heart and fiction seems, to me,  to be the antithesis of my experience of the web.

What’s more important in a novel – beautiful writing or a gripping plot?
Neither. I’ll read something and appreciate its writing and have often forced myself to read something because it is wonderfully written but will, like Laura, put up with crap writing if the story has sucked me in. The reason why a book works, or it doesn’t, isn’t as easy to isolate as ‘beautiful writing’ or ‘gripping plot’.

Most loved/memorable character?
I’ve always had a penchant for Ripley and as far as I am concerned he looks nothing like Matt Damon (he’s not blonde for a start).

Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment?
The aforementioned Gift of Speed, Parklife by Nick Varley, and the incredibly-hard-to-get-hold-of Rosalie Gascoigne by Vici McDonald. I’m going to have to return it to the library soon. I am sure my mother must have renewed it more than once by now…

What was the last book you read?
Alice Garner’s The Student Chronicles. I was picking up my son from my parents’ place and saw it on the shelf so I grabbed it.

Have you ever given up on a book halfway in?
Many, many times. As a young child I remember giving up on a book because it ‘depressed’ me. I can’t remember the name or the author but it was the first time I could not continue with a book. I was 10 and I have never forgotten that moment when I put it down and thought, I’m not going to read that.

Proud as punch

This evening Dash’s choice for bedtime reading was Farmer Duck. He had borrowed it from the school library. It’s about a duck who lives with a lazy farmer. The duck does all the work while the farmer lays in bed and calls out ‘How’s the work?’ all day. One day the other animals, incensed at the duck’s predicament, stage a coup, of sorts. The farmer ends up running off, never to return. The animals end up working the farm themselves, free from the farmer. (You can see where this is going can’t you?)

When we finished the book, Dash looked at the picture of all the animals working and said

“Ha! An animal farm!”

Exacty my son, exactly.

(Yes it’s coincidental but it tickled me).

Classic websites: Homage to the BOM

This is the 100th year of the Bureau of Meteorology.  I thought I should take the opportunity to pay tribute to the BOM – for a website that intrigues, comforts and forewarns. It has become as familiar as Mike Bailey. (And is far more intelligent than Tim Bailey).

It has a simple, no-frills interface that belies a top 40 website that is seen on work desktops everywhere (god help the sys admin who tries to place it behind Web Marshal). And all it does it tell us about the weather, information we can get anywhere. For some reason though Australians can’t get enough of the BOM.

We have a fascination with the weather, with predicting it and talking about it after it has happened. That’s pretty obvious. We talk about lazy winds that go through us not around, we talk about scorchers that turn the state into a tinderbox, rain pissing down, hail as big as golfballs, the fact that it’s blowing a gale and that green clouds mean hail so you better get your car into the nearest shopping centre carpark quick smart. We sweat our dates off in 100 per cent humidity and freeze our tits off because some of us refuse to believe that it gets cold in Australia. For some people the weather is a conversation starter. Sometimes I think Australians see it as THE conversation. Even more than that, it’s a topic for serious study.

So with our penchant for chatting, nay, obessing about it we obviously want to be as informed as possible and where better to go than the BOM itself. Some are obsessed by the mesmerising four frame radar loop and then there are the warnings that elicit a ripple of excitement around offices everywhere. Storms! Winds! Pack away the plastic garden furniture! Move away from windows and turn off your telly! Perhaps office workers need to get a life but when an announcement goes out over the loud-speaker or an all-users email is sent out about the weather I know that almost every person in the building will be typing be-oh-em-dot-gee-oh-vee-dot-ay-you into their standard operating system browser.

Some of us are observers, watching every movement in temperature or drop of rain in detail. I’m definitely an observer. I recently found myself emailing someone to tell them we had had 12mm in 26 minutes. (Ahem). Some are forecasters. Some can’t get dressed, let alone leave home, without knowing in detail what the BOM has in store for the day. Packing for trips away is governed by the oracle of the BOM. They never really remember if the BOM was wrong, but they keep looking at the site. It gives them a sense of control over their life and confidence in their choice of outfit. There’s nothing worse than being surprised and finding that you are wearing too many or too few clothes.

Observer or forecaster, we all read the same bible. bom.gov.au – thank you and keep up the good work. Oh yeah, and never change, we like you just the way you are: no-frills.

Unpacked

Well we’ve moved in to our brand spanking new renovator’s delight but the boxes are anything but unpacked. Not even the books. I’ve realised how out-of-character this is. The first thing I do when I move into a new rented house is position the bookshelves and start unpacking the books. I make up a new categorisation system every time. Well, that’s not technically correct. I use the same categorisation system (vague Dewey grouping with no real attempt at alphabetisation) but I position the books differently.

It has become more and more difficult to position things as the book collection has grown but the shelf space has not. I usually have an internal argument about which books should be in ‘public’ areas – like the loungeroom – and which books should be in the ‘private’ areas – like the study. I remember reading an article about Kim Beasley a long time ago that discussed this very argument: he had it with his wife. Kim felt that non-fiction and ’serious’ books should be publicly displayed, his wife felt that fiction looked better to visitors. When I think about my parents’ reading habits I can see them having the same argument. Maybe it’s a gender thing. I don’t know. It’s obviously driven by how we conceive of our book collections and how we think others see us, in light of it.

I remember that article every time I unpack my books.

I’ve been swayed by aesthetic concerns in my recent unpacks, the ‘prettier’ categories of books get to go public. So art, with its big hardcovers and swanky dustjackets, gets to stay. My hardcover/dustjacketed fiction collection has grown in recent years so I usually pick out the best-looking books that I consider to be of quality (ahem) and they stay. Dodgy paperbacks are automatically relegated to private or backrow stacking (I double pack everything these days due to space restrictions) but if the book is Australian or I particularly love it, it goes into consideration for public/front row status.

In years gone by I would have put philosophy and cultural studies (aka teh theory) out there to be seen but the last few moves have seen me squirrel away my Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche et al. Why? I have no idea. Sudden shame? Boredom?

Lit Crit is sometimes public and sometimes private, depending on what I am working on, or pretending to work on. If I am really into it, it’s more than likely in the study because it’s practical. So if you ever come into my house and see it in the loungeroom you can guess that it won’t be at the front of my mind.

Groups of books that I see as being at odds with other groups – my collection of football books for example – get to go public because I feel I’m being honest in displaying them. It says: “yes, I am a literature girl but I love sport and hell, I know more about sport than most people and if I’m going to be honest with you, you have to know that not only have I read Nick Hornby (pfft) but I’ve read a plethora of rubbish books about English football, once bought a book about darts because of one page of stupendous description and place Football Against the Enemy and Muscle as two of my favourite books of all time”.

One section that I make no apologies for making brazenly public – and much to the disgust no doubt of Mr Beasley – is poetry, specifically Australian poetry. I just think it’s something that needs to be done to maintain good health, like eating weet-bix every morning from here to eternity, but with perhaps slightly more enjoyment. (And that’s not a slight on poetry, I happen to enjoy weet-bix).

Right now I’m sitting in a room with a bookshelf that has very few books on it. (We’re waiting until the floors are polished to unpack the books). There’s a few library books, a book borrowed from my mother that has been finished and is waiting to be delivered back up the road to her. There’s a Scrabble box, a bunch of recipe books, a tool kit and some newspapers, amongst a whole lot of other crap. I’m starting to really miss my books. (I went to the library at lunch today just to breathe the pages). If the floors aren’t polished soon I don’t know what I’ll do.

(Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla).