USE IT

I’ve had a horrible weekend. The step-kids buzzing around me, watching as a soon-to-be-relative struggled with her incredibly sick son, Mr 11 bursting into tears at the drop of a hat and Ms 8 pointing out to me that I am not her mother, the ex asking Tom to drive the kids home from vacation care because she couldn’t be bothered.

It sucked.

Tom listened patiently as I spat out my woes, my angst, onto his broad shoulders. I asked how he handled it. I asked how it didn’t drive him into the ground and he struggled to offer me an answer that completely satisfied me.

“How do you feel when people talk about journalism?” he offered. I grimaced.
“I feel the same way about the ex that you do about journalism so I just don’t think about it because it annoys me too much.”

It didn’t apply. “Journalism doesn’t come and visit once a fortnight. Journalism doesn’t ring me up and ask me to do it favours. Journalism is my past.”

Tom grimaced and walked around the back yard with a purpose to solving my woes. I didn’t expect him to find any but I’ve been wrong before.

“You told me that to write you have to be in a mood. Could this mood do? When you feel like this, when you’re angry and annoyed, why don’t you just sit down and write.”

I mulled it over. I tossed around the idea and then thought about the reality of slipping into my own world when I’d had enough of this one.

For months the writing has all but stopped. Not only because of time restraints but because it’s been near impossible to focus with everything that’s been going on. Now, Tom was suggesting that I use the angst to focus on something that was mine along.

Tom was offering me back a part of myself. He was insisting I find space for myself.

The man’s a genius.

So in one night I managed to pull together 9 pages of my novel. Nine scatty and waffly pages that I wrote, time that I took for myself.

Me. My time. My novel.

It’s all still a possibility if I can just learn to use my moods effectively.

DOWNS AND UPS

The room suddenly goes silent. Voices drop away and for a moment there’s a pause. Then there’s panicked calls across the room.

“Go manual, go manual.”

It’s a sudden call that oddly elicits little reaction except for one of the senior telephone operators. She walks calmly from desk to desk, handing out seven digit codes for each telephone anchored worker.

“1189325.” She smiles at me.

I punch in the code and the phone bips at me before falling back into silence. And there we sit. Waiting for the calls to rush in. But it’s still silent.

Silence in this room is wrong. It’s always alive. For one hour only the click of typing could be hears. Not a ring in the growing void of a room.

There’s the low murmur of voices as the operators catch up on a weeks worth of gossip but there’s nothing professional about it. The manager stands in her cubicle, talking to the technical squad trying to rectify this disastrous situation.

“We’re up.” Another call across the room and the murmuring stops.

The phones all bip as they’re taken off manual and return to the computerised system. Phones begin to ring.

We’re back on line and the phones begin to ring.

I’m really loving this job. I love its ups and downs. I love its normalcy.

And each day I return home to Tom. We talk about our jobs and eat and do much of nothing.

I'm like this. My workplace is a metaphore for my life. When the silence arrives something is wrong - even though it isn't.

In the silence I keep hearing “I should be bored by now. I should be running a mile.”

But I know that voice all too well. I’ve seen it destroy relationship after relationship with its lies.

It’s so much easier to believe that it’s our life and not us that’s the problem. I’m not falling into that trap again. I refuse to give the beast any power over my decisions.

“You’re not going to last in this job,” it hisses. “And Tom is cheating on you with his ex.”

I hate this voice. I hate that it’s taking up so much of my time and energy. I hate that it’s locking me in a personal hell.

The beast doesn’t disappear just because I’m happy.

GRIEF

I have to confess this right now.

I don’t care.

I don’t care who won the golden globes. I don’t care about police seizures of drugs. I don’t care that you’re unable to feed your family. I don’t care that there’s been an accident in the street out the front of this building. I don’t care that some celebrity has an eating disorder. I don’t care that there’s an increase in drug addiction.

I don’t care.

And what has brought on this spurt of indifference? Well it’s not a spurt. It’s who I am. It’s who I always was – I just used to feel so incredibly guilty for not wanting to take an active interest in the world.

That’s why my journalism career died. Not because I mouthed of a little too much to my boss but because I simply wasn’t interested.

Interviewing people who turned 100 bored me to death. Seriously, they no more have the secret to long life than I have the solution to Fermat’s last theorem.

The local clubs and hotels who only did fundraisers if we promised them coverage used to anger me no end. We’d write these polished little stories about how good they were to the community when you knew for a fact they were only “lending a hand” because it meant more advertising.

And now it’s the tsunami. This is nothing short of pathetic.

This is clearly a tragedy. This is clearly something horrific. But be damned if I’m not sick to death of the media bleeding it dry. This isn’t an advertising campaign but every news channel and every newspaper is spreading whatever images they can simply to make people feel horrible.

"A Nation Mourns". How dare they. They have no right.

Everyone feels horrible enough. We struggle through our daily lives the best we can an now we have the added misery of having to suffer through the horror of someone else’s misery.

I have compassion. I feel incredibly sad for the hundreds of thousands who have been affected by this. But damn.

I’m done with it. I’m done with feeling sorry for other people. We all have our woes. Life is hard enough without having to carry the burdens of others.

From now on I’m saving my grief for when it’s time – not because everyone keeps telling me how sad I should feel when clearly I don’t.

Because I’m not sad. I’m not grieving. I’m alive and everyone I love is around me.

I would have thought the greatest respect you could show those left behind after such a disaster is to allow them their grief and not claim it as your own.

You have no right.

NICE AND SHINY

Tom and I hit the mall early. 8.30am. To avoid the crowds.

Our mission was to find me an engagement ring that made me happy, made him happy but above all would be “perfect”.

“You won’t settle for something that’s close?” Tom asked as we entered in to hour number three, dragging ourselves from jewellery store to jewellery store. We’d finally collapsed into the soft seats at Starbucks in the centre of Westfields Parramatta.

It all looked the same. Gold and diamonds blurring our vision and generally annoying me. At this time I was willing to settle.

I’m not a girl that’s swayed by shiny trinkets but this had to be done. I had to get my engagement ring.

Finally we pulled ourselves together and faced the daunting prospect of another couple of hours hanging in the over-lit jewellery shops. Our jaundice faces reflected by the shiny walls.

“What about that one?” Tom tried to help but let’s face it, when it comes to picking jewellery he’s a wonderful cook.

“Ah, it’s a little too ornate.” I tried not to laugh. The ring he pointed out burned into my retinas and under the fluorescent lights it looked more like a disco ball than a ring.

“I was joking,” he smirked. His finger slid across the once clean glass of the shop to a ring with channel-set princess cut diamonds. Eight in all. “That one.”

The ring was beautiful but for all my practical senses I wanted something less logical and more engagement.

Next to Tom’s perfect ring sat another ring. Almost identical but with a ninth princess cut diamond with a single clasp-set solitaire raised ever so slightly in the middle.

So we walked off, leaving it behind as we travelled through the panic of people and into a further six stores.

But something was bugging me.

I would dismiss everything because I couldn’t get past it. That one ring kept becoming the measuring stick by which all other rings were compared.

And with that the ring was sized and three days later on my finger.

It’s been two weeks now and I just can’t stop looking at it.

BITCH AND MOAN

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m bored. The phones rang off their tits all day today. I mean for six straight hours I was lucky to find time to take a breath between each call. God, they had all these temps in when we didn't need them and suddenly there's a big rush and we're understaffed.”

“And for the last two hours?’

“Silence. No, worse than silence. That hiss from the air conditioning. I mean Jesus, the sun comes out and suddenly they think we want to work in sub-zero temperatures.”

Christine scratched her nose. A sly smirk spreading across her face.

“So.” A long pause. “How do you like being back in the real workforce. Underpaid and under appreciated. Trapped and confined for hours on end doing something that is ultimately meaningless?”

Sometimes this woman pisses me off. And sometime’s she knows the right questions to ask.

“Actually, I love it.”

“Thought so.”

"What gave it away?"

"You've got a job that pays your bills; you hang out with people that you actually like the company of; you don't have to take it home at night and; it gives you the right to bitch and moan. What's not to love?"

"Now you mention it I did miss that."

"What, paying your bills?"

"No, the bitch and moan. It's probably the best part of working."

"Damn straight."

LOOSE ENDS

I don’t know why… I just did.

It was some time in May that I last spoke to him, my far away and silent ex. A man I didn’t love but who was such a big part of my life that each time I opened my email account his address was the most prominent.

Now that everything’s changed I felt a desire to finish off that chapter of my life via a simple email stating that I was getting married.

“Dear G,”

So far so good. It’s about as far as I got before a number of phone calls interrupted.

“Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been in contact but I’ve been busy building a new life. For the past seven months I’ve been seeing someone and well, turns out, he’s the one and I’ll be getting married some time in April.”

Not bad. I mean respectively I ran off from him and haven’t responded to his emails for months or answered his calls. It’s been this lingering loose end that I simply couldn’t let lie.

“You know it’s funny. After all the jokes we made about not wanting to become a boring suburbanite it turns out that I do. I want the simple job, the husband, the kids and a three bedroom home in some quiet little town.”

It’s true. For all my urges to be a part of that snobbish elite group of writers who make their own lives miserable so they have something to write about it’s not where I belong.

I’m still a writer but I just can’t be a pretentious, elitist. I like people too much.

“Anyway I have to go. I hope everything work out for you. Boswell”

And that was that.

I sat for a moment and considered the email. I haven’t been thinking of G and this sudden burst of contact was unnecessary.

Instead of sending it I deleted it and his address from my address book.

I don’t need to tie up all my loose ends, sometimes I should just let them unravel by themselves.