Not-Quite-Narnia

My bedroom looks like a dump.

This isn’t exclusively due to me being lazy (although, to be honest, that’s become a contributing factor). It’s mainly because for nearly a month, plumbers have been working on the bathroom pipes, using my wardrobe as an access point. I suppose I should be at least a little excited that I have a wardrobe leading to another world. This Narnia-esque touch is not enough to override my horrible mess of a bedroom, and the effect it seems to be having on my psyche.

Due to the work, my wardrobe’s contents and the stuff I keep on that side on my room is now on or around my bed. It’s times like this I’m glad I’m single, because sleeping by myself is hard enough at the moment. I could have the things better organised, but the mess is something I’ve not been able to bring myself to deal with. The older I get, the more of a problem I seem to have with clutter in my space. It has a very negative effect on me, and distracts me from all the things I know are a priority for me to deal with. I’ve felt it becoming a negative cycle, catching myself thinking things like “well, there’s no point putting that away, cause it’s just a mess anyway”, or “I won’t deal with these letters until my desk is clean again”.

Needless to say, there has been a period of supreme inactivity and procrastination at Chez Nikita.

The really sad part of this (well, the sad part to me) is before the plumbers came, I had just gotten my space organised to a point where it was very functional and pleasing to me. I’m now looking forward to having the time to put everything back together, but part of me feels that it will be an insurmountable obstacle when I actually get to it. I suppose I’ll start with putting everything back in the wardrobe.

I know this probably seems like a trivial thing to be worried about, but this messy period in my house has coincided with a nasty bout of slump in my personal progress. I’ve been sick, had really mentally low points, seen a decrease in progress physically, and not been achieving (or even working on) the goals I’ve set myself. I’m feeling so goddamn frustrated, and I’m looking for something to point to as the reason.

I blame my wardrobe.

 

Happy

This is a picture of me when I was feeling happy.

I was looking for pictures of my family to print out and pin up on my wall at work, and I found this. It’s mid-December 2013, and I’m on my first ever solo trip (and my second time out of Australia). I’d left a toxic job in November, and decided to take off and travel for a month over Christmas and New Year. I’d only left the country once before; I went to Singapore in May that year with my concert band (band camp was fabulous, and before you ask, I play clarinet). I decided to go to Europe. I’d always wanted to go to Germany, so that was where I started.

This is a picture of me standing in the palace gardens in the Old Town (Aldstadt) of Dachau. Dachau is a beautiful part of Bavaria, just outside of Munich. Behind me in the photo, you can see the greater Munich area. I went to Dachau to see the concentration camp there. The camp at Dachau was one of the original camps, and a lot of the larger camps were modelled on it. While it wasn’t built as an extermination camp, a lot of people lost their lives there. It was a truly grounding experience, and left me feeling more than I can write here.

After an experience like that, I didn’t expect to be so happy. Perhaps it was because I witnessed the remnants of one of the greatest horrors committed by our species, I was able to appreciate what I had. I remember feeling true peace and joy as I walked through Aldstadt. From the gardens of the palace, I felt like everything stretching out in front of me was full of possibility.

I think this was the only holiday I’ve been on where I wasn’t worried about money. I mean, I had no income, so I was going home to nothing, but worst case scenario I could move in with family until I got on my feet. I had no debt, I was where I wanted to be, and this was how I wanted to feel.

Recently, I’ve been getting into personal finance management in a big way. I’m watching online lectures, budgeting like mad, and annihilating my debts. I’ve committed to getting home to Australia for Christmas, and I want to do that totally debt free. I want to be able to go somewhere and fully enjoy the experience. I never want to have to “worry” about money again after this year. I want to lie on a beach, and only worry about whether I’m getting sunburnt. I want to be with my family on Christmas day, and only worry about whether the presents I bought survived the trip from Canada. I want to see my friends, and not worry about having smashed avo on toast.

I want joy to be my base level of operation from now on.

Poetry Slam

I went to a poetry slam. As I left, I was overcome by a wave of pseudo-intellectualism, and wrote this.

 

I push my skirt between my knees
And clamber onto the bench
To listen to poetry.

I hear raw words,
Uneven beats.
Sometimes it rhymes and climbs in intensity
And moves my soul.

Now I am a poet.

I speak fine words,
I leak emotion, express pain, show stoicism.
I talk of merit and hypocrisy,
Knowing full well I am a hypocrite.

I am not one of them.
In those moments I want to be,
But I am too mainstream,
My skirt to clean, my suffering too beige.
I judge myself before others,
Because then they can’t hurt me.

I am not one of them.
I am not a poet, but this is not a pipe.

I laugh at their clicks,
But I love their courage.

I am not a poet,
Though my soul is screaming.
I have so much to give,
And though it bursts out in muddled metre,
I am not a poet.

This is not a pipe.

A Haiku or Two (or Three)

Today is to be a day of poetry. This morning, I decided to go to a poetry slam with a friend. Jokingly I said to him “I’m probably going to see how much I can talk in haiku today, just to mess with people”. I didn’t realise how foretelling this would be.

At the start of the production season, the office sent out a draft list of contacts for everyone working on the show. I needed to email someone this morning, so I looked up his email address, wrote a perfunctory message, and sent it away into the ether. A little later I received this message in reply:

“A haiku trio for the Lucky Mistypist:

these I often get
messages, requests and such
of these, i know not

one Mister Bob Smith
is not all Mister Bob Smiths
beg to please try again

in your contact list
please amend all reference
strike misterbobsmith

Good luck on your programs,
Mr Smith”

Just to be clear, his name was not Bob Smith, but as he did not ask me to write a blog post about him, I didn’t think it kind to splash his real name about. His surname is Smith, so I shall refer to him as Mr Smith from this point forward.

I have never been so delighted to have sent an email to the wrong address. I, of course, replied as thus:

“Dear Bob,

The fault is all mine,
Misguided, I wandered lost
In email quagmires.

A new season’s work
Gives false information lists
Of worker contacts.

You’re unique response
Piqued my interests nicely.
I reply in kind.

All the best,

Nikita”

I have still not heard back from the delightful mystery poet. I hope I do.

This incident does leave me wondering if the best poetry of the day is already behind me.

Songs From The Old Country

Living in a different country than the one you grew up in has it’s challenges, but one that didn’t truly occur to me until I’d been in Canada for a while was the lack of Australian music. Yes, I know, it’s Canada! They have their own music (hat tip to The Tragically Hip and The Barenaked Ladies). I knew this, and I was expecting this. Still, when you listen to the radio as you’re driving and they have the nerve to play a version of Love Is In The Air not performed by John Paul Young, I challenge you not to feel a deep fury and nearly breaking the radio as you stab the button with your finger to change the station.

There was a point sometime last year where the nostalgia hit, and I spent the better part of a day saving random Australian songs to my Spotify account. This was everything from Cat Empire and John Butler Trio, to Paul Kelly and Cold Chisel. I remember that day I just lay on the couch and let the sadness and homesickness wash over me. For those who aren’t regular readers, I was more than a little depressed for the last year and a bit. Getting sad and listening to music from home in a lounge room pity puddle was basically a good day back then. One of the things it’s easy to forget when you’re depressed out of your mind is how fantastic music is. Now that my brain is grooving to a better beat, I can tune into that part of my life again and get joy out of the best kind of soul food available.

This morning when I got to work, I checked my messages as I sipped my first coffee of the day (another small joy). My bloody good mate, Kate, had sent me a message. Kate and I are both from Perth, and were friends back home. We decided to move to Vancouver at roughly the same time, having no idea that each other was doing the same thing. You can probably imagine there was a lot a squealing and hugging when we realised there would be a familiar face around when we uprooted our lives. I got here a month or two before her, and she has become one of my best friends during our time here.

Anyway, this morning I got  message from Kate. She said she’d played some Aussie Crawl at the cafe where she worked. Inspired, I fired up Spotify, plugged in my headphones, and put on Mental As Anything’s song Live It Up. Sitting at my desk looking at my emails, I was dancing in my chair (I may or may not have made up a dance routine to this song while driving my car in Australia years ago). Instantly I was transported to the time my ex-boyfriend and I went to a food festival in Tasmania, not knowing The Mentals were the headline act. Just to be clear, my ex is Canadian, and had no idea who they were. I squealed a lot and started busting out my stupid dance moves, and the way he looked at me as I danced made me think for the first time that he might fall in love with me one day. There was no pain attached to this memory any more, and I was just able to be grateful for that experience.

Maybe the power of my Australiana binge had summoning powers. After less than half an hour, for no reason at all, the only other Australian in the production office walked into my office to talk to me. I’m embracing the woo woo, so I’m choosing to believe it was the power of my merry Aussie bopping (I think when he walked in, I had just hit a Vance Joy song).

There is something transporting about the music of you homeland. There’s a certain feel that’s different. Every song has a personal connotation, every artist the ability to conjure home to your heart. I live overseas, I want to travel the world, but I love Australia and I always will. Something about the landscape, the beach and the smell of eucalypts will never leave me. Aussie music is my teleportation device.

As I’m writing this, The Nips Are Getting Bigger by the Mentals has come on my music shuffle. Good timing, guys!

Not-So-Gentle Reminder

Here’s a short, but hardly sweet, quick riff for you all.

I was driving to work today when, like every day, I pulled up behind another car at an intersection. I was staring off into the middle distance in front of me, when I realised something was not right. I focused in on the car ahead of me, and saw the man in the passenger seat was beating up on the woman in the driver seat. He was shouting at her, shoving her, yanking her down towards the hand brake by her hair, and I’m pretty sure he hit her.

My first reaction was freezing. This delicious society we live in speaks of defending those in need, but quite often our action or lack there of is driven by an inclination to mind our own business. This didn’t last long, as I became the physical incarnation of “fuck this!” I put on the hazards, slammed the car into park, struggled with my seatbelt, then ran over to the car. I believe I was shouting something witty like “hey!”

The woman in the car in front of theirs clearly had the same idea as me, because we met each other at the driver’s side window. She shouted at the man to get off the woman, where I shouted at the woman trying to find out if she wanted our help. The woman in the car made apologetic motions at us, indicating she was fine. The woman from the front car started walking back to her car, but I lingered. The fight started again. I opened the driver’s door and interrupted, asking again if she wanted help. She said sorry, and that it was okay. Reluctantly, I walked back to my car.

I ended up driving down the same patch of highway as them for a few minutes. He kept at her, as they were driving, and the car swerved a few times. I memorised the number plate and model, and called the police as soon as I got to work.

When the call operator asked for the plate number, I had a mental blank. I hadn’t taken a photo or called while driving, because I didn’t want to break the law and use my phone. Turns out, that’s totally okay. Here’s the aside moral of the story: if you see some horrible shit going down while you’re driving, the police in Vancouver will let you use your phone to record and report it. Another aside moral is don’t impair the driving ability of the person operating the vehicle you are currently travelling in.

Here’s the actual moral of the story: work to create a society where violence against women is no longer the endemic problem it currently is. Challenge sexist language and behaviour when you see it. Men, please call out other men when they casually talk women down to be things instead of people. If you see something going on that you don’t think is right, call it out (either directly or, if it feels unsafe, by calling the police). Raise your children without the toxic gender-normative throwback ideas (“when a boy pushes you, it means he likes you!”). Got a spare couple of bucks? Make a donation to a women’s help or education organisation. For Vancouver locals, please see the below link for Rape Relief, a fantastic women’s refuge and social education non-profit.

Please just don’t mind your own business any more.

Donate to Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter: https://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/help/donate/donate