Done!

So November comes to an end, and with it, my daily blogging commitment.

I'll most likely do a Christmas set up day post at the weekend, but life is super, super hectic at the moment - I am not promising to do much more than that until I close my doors for business on 19 December. That is, both happily and scarily, only two weeks from next Tuesday - but there is a large tonne of work I need to get through before that!

It's been fun. In a busy month, it's been a good anchor, and I have enjoyed it. I think it was always a more realistic commitment than NaNoWriMo, to be frank, and one I'll try to do each year.

But for now ... adieu!

(This is post #30 in NaBloPoMo. DONE!!)

On tricking my brain and lessons learned the hard way

Today I had a day where, for absolutely no rational reason, I felt convinced I was pretty much rubbish. A fraud. An Imposter, you might even say. I started to feel negative as all get out about everything. I became convinced that:

a) my poetry was all garbage and the poetry book planned for next year was An Epically Bad Idea;
b) my freelance work was all garbage and all my clients were soon going to discover this;
c) I am a terrible parent;
c) my ability to do anything at all except cook and perhaps do laundry was simply illusory.

What triggered it? HowthehelldoIknow. Feedback on documents, maybe? (Although it was very professional and cogent, and not at all difficult, and in fact they are giving input that will definitely shape the documents positively). A slightly cool email from a former client in response to a request for work that I had to turn down because I'm just too busy? An email from the travel agent with a few curveballs for our trip that I wasn't expecting? The heat? A sore gut? Christmas approaching while I am in a state of unreadiness? The clash of my older and younger kids' end of year events which is forcing me to miss one or the other? The position of the moon respective to the rise of Venus?

It could've been any of those things or none of those things or a few of them together. (The last is most likely). But whatever the reason, this is a mood state that I recognise. I've been down this road a time or ten, and it never feels good, and it always drags me down.

But here's the good part of the story.

When I saw a psychologist for 6 months back in 2014, when my brain was actively trying to kill me, one of the things she helped me work on was recognising when my brain was lying to me - either by telling me things that were, verifiably, untrue, or by catastrophising perfectly normal incidents or roadblocks as being major indictments on me as a person. I practised - and it was hard to learn, really hard - identifying unhelpful thoughts and pushing back on them. I practised logic in the face of illogic.

All that work I did in 2014, I see the benefits on days like today. Because although my mood remains recalcitrantly low, I have had some success in combating the irrational negative *thoughts*, and arguing myself into recognising that actually there are objective measures of my at-least-adequacy in most areas of my life. Strangling off those operatic I B CRAP thoughts is still not easy, but I have to say, when I am able to do it, it is satisfying - and it puts me in a better place to get up and get on with life tomorrow.

(This is post #29 in NaBloPoMo. Just one to go now!)

Untitled Poem

the moon on a hot night:

two-thirds full but I can see the shadow of the rest of it
bright enough to catch the furtive tails of the cats slinking along the wall

not bright enough to drown out the weak city stars
trembling their faint pinpoints against a grey-washed light-polluted sky

weird enough to paint ghosts in a too-soon-summer miasma
bunched-up fists of clouds skittering like air-rats around a knothole

the moon looks down, and forgets:
the world washed in chrome below.

- Kathy, 28/11/17

(This is post #28 in NaBloPoMo. 28 down, 2 to go!)

Domestic And Admin Day

I think I need to schedule a domestic and life administration day this week.

Normally, this far away from the last one, I'd be looking for an opportunity for a mental health day (day off!), but realistically those are very hard to come by in November and December. At this time of year, the best  I can do to protect my mental health is to set, and enforce, boundaries around time on a weekly basis - refrain from working at weekends, making sure I switch off the computer by 9:30pm so I can have an hour to read before bed, and so on.

That said, with being so very, very busy with work (both paid and creative), family obligations, trip planning and end of year stuff, I am sliding a little out of control in the domestic sphere. I mean, I am not a neatnik (thank God, given my family's propensities!) but I have a limit, and we are over it and then some in terms of household functionality. In particular, our laundry situation is suboptimal +++, which is starting to have a daily impact. Additionally, there are a bunch of life administrative things I need to get onto - booking and going to appointments of various kinds (for me and the kids), doing paperwork, dropping stuff off to op shops, picking up things, etc etc etc.

This is definitely the week - very possibly the only week before Christmas! - to do this. I'm sitting in the eye of the storm work-wise and it will not last. I'm about to send off a major piece of work to my interstate client, after which I need to wait for their response and confirmation before proceeding (likely to be early next week). For one of my local projects, I have items out for consultation which closes on Thursday night; until that happens, I can't progress in that project either. With a third project, I do have interviews booked for Thursday, but cannot do anything else before that. That leaves only one project which can be usefully worked on this week, and while there is certainly plenty to do for it, I can definitely see programming in a day (or two half-days) of house and life work is a possibility, especially in the first part of the week.

I think I might do it as a half-day on each of Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons actually. Make a list, try to get through it. Although it can be useful to have a consolidated housework day sometimes, two half-days might be easier to motivate myself to stick to. I can bribe myself with the promise of listening to podcasts as I clean / sort clothes / fill in superannuation paperwork.

(This is post #27 in NaBloPoMo. 27 down, 3 to go!)

Questions I Ask Myself At 3am (Poem)

A Madrigal: Questions I Ask Myself At 3am

The one I ask most oftentimes is this:
What is life and living even for?
An existential commonplace to bore.

Sometimes I ask what it is I miss
by refusing all the darkness and its spore;
by closing down the lid on all of this
the fresh pains and the old ones; hearts are for

the opera of knife-blades and a kiss
the beauty and the fury still at war
a storming sea to reach translucent shore.
At 3am I sometimes wonder this:
What is my poet's yearning looking for?
To find truegold, how deep must I learn to bore?

- Kathy, 26/11/17

(This is post #26 in NaBloPoMo. 26 down, oh my goodness only 4 to go that means it is almost December HOLD ME)

Jorōgumo (Poem)

This is a multi-verse haiku with a running foot (ie lines that flow on from each other) that I am working on as a possibility for the poetry book. The story is that of Jorōgumo, a type of Yōkai (monster, ghost, or goblin) from Japanese folklore. Jorōgumo is a woman-spider - she can appear as a beautiful young woman to lure men into her webs, but in fact she is a venomous spider who traps, kills and consumes her prey. She usually lives near water, often a waterfall. In some versions of the story, she appears to be holding an infant, which is actually made of thousands of spider-eggs which then burst open.

I am not especially arachnophobic, but I will not deny that this story is a little shuddery even for me. Sometimes it's good to go to darker places, though. As usual, I am trying to find (or create) another meaning in the story.

Because this might end up in the book, feedback SUPER, SUPER welcome! (The phrase "clever abyss" is a reference to one version of the story where a traveller tricks a Jorōgumo by ensnaring the web tendrils around a tree stump instead of themselves; the Jorōgumo whispers "clever, clever" as the stump is drawn into the water, and this is the source where Kashikobuchi, or "clever abyss", takes its name).

Jorōgumo

the waters fall; clear

and pure above my hidden

snares; my damp, dark nest

a clever abysss

whirls in my jewel-bright eyes;

the stars and the moon

look down, say nothing.

I put on breasts and belly,

costuming for them

baiting my skein-trap

with the scent of their desire

within the forest

in the dark I spin

in twilight i am hunter

in the dawn, legion

my children bursting

life life life to run and dance

a thousand splinters

I am as I am;

I hunt and I eat, and men

fatten my she-blood

their eyes grown wider

as they look upon their death;

all iridescence 

and long-legged, red

in sting and mouth-bite

sticky with longing

the hunger that drives

them into my arms, and I

to sing their dirges soft

and aching-sweet; the

water forgets all that was,

and the web shimmers

caught in the sunlight;

I consume, and create, and

yes am born again.

- Kathy, 25/11/17

(This is post #25 in NaBloPoMo; 25 down, 5 to go!)

Best and Worst Festive Day / Public Holidays

The best three public holidays / festive days of the year, in my opinion, are:

1. Halloween. I LOVE Halloween. I love the dressing up and the trick or treating and the way the kids get so into it. I love the "safe spookiness" and the decorations and the candy and the community spirit and the fun. It never feels stressy for me. I look forward to it every year.

2. Grand Final Eve. I am not in the slightest a football person and I detest Grand Final boozers and loud GF parties, BUT the advent of this new public holiday has given us the lovely gift of a long weekend at the end of the spring school holidays were we can go away as a family. In the first year of the holiday, we went to Bendigo and visited with friends; in year 2, we went to Ballarat and had Sovereign Hill largely to ourselves; and this year, we incorporated it into our Sydney trip. All good stuff!

3. Easter. There is something super fun about Easter when you have kids, and Easter lamb is the business. This is another holiday that never feels stressful for me.

The worst three public holidays / festive days of the year, for me, are:

1. New Year's Eve. NO CONTEST this is hands-down the pits. The bass thump of loud parties all around all night, people doing stupid shit in stupid ways, the animals getting agitated and terrified ... There is nothing I like about it. (Well, I don't mind fireworks - the legal ones anyway, the illegal ones make me super anxious about fire risks).

2. Australia Day. This one is especially yuk if located next to a weekend, but either the night before or the night of, it also spawns too many loud parties. I am also extremely uncomfortable with what it "celebrates".

3. Melbourne Cup Day. This is not because of noise exactly, but because I am increasingly disturbed and a bit disgusted at both the animal cruelty involved and the excess manifested by racegoers. Spring racing carnival is my least favourite time to be catching trains, especially near the end of a race day - I've had shoes vomited on not once but twice in my life, and both times were by pissed racegoers.

The other holidays / festive days I would bracket together as "mostly enjoyable, occasionally a bit stressful or else not remarkable": Christmas Day (which is usually good but can be a bit pressured); Boxing Day, Queens Birthday, Labour Day and ANZAC Day (all of which are fine, good even, but not especially notable, particularly now I am a freelancer and I don't get paid public holidays so I tend to treat them like any other day really).

So there you go. My Holiday Primer!

(This is post #23 in NaBloPoMo. 23 down, 7 to go!)

The delicate dance

I've been reflecting lately on where to draw the line in social justice conversations between shutting up and listening, and offering factual information that might be pertinent.

I fully accept that in most discussions, I am in a position of great relative privilege, and the discussion is neither about me nor for me. My opinions and feels on racism, homophobia and so on are not relevant or interesting. My role is to get out of the light, listen, reflect, and where appropriate, change my behaviour and outlook as a response. As a born argumentator, this has not necessarily been an easy lesson to learn, but it is very necessary one.

So my dilemma now is not about curtailing my own desire to add my views, or express my feelings. But I still struggle with holding back from offering facts / data where it seems relevant to the conversation - and, in particular, correcting obvious errors of fact which are leading to conclusions that might not be all that supportable.

Look, I get that facts are not neutral, and that the interspersion of some kinds of data can be a very hostile and undermining act. I get that it is not up to me to ride around the Internet arguing with everyone who's misreporting or misinterpreting data (or purveying fake news, for that matter). I get that a lot of the time, the facts are not the issue anyway.

But when you see someone basing their argument on an objectively false piece of data, what's the right thing to do? Do you try to engage with why their feelings about that thing may be so variant with the actual data? Do you accept that lived experiences aren't always reflected in hard numbers? Do you look at the argument as a detatched thing from its putative evidence base, and try to read it on its own merits? For me, it is hard to accept the validity of something that is based on false or misunderstood facts, even if I can see the logical or emotional scaffolding of it. That may well by my failing, but there is no use in pretending it isn't a real thing in how I read and respond.

I do not know the answer to this, but I am increasingly sure that whatever it is, it ISN'T "pipe up with stats and a link". It is just as inappropriate in a different way as making the conversation about my straight white lady feels or 'pinions. Sit down, shut up, and work through it in the privacy of my own head needs to be the watchword.

Tired and bored with myself

I am getting sick of this.

(This is post #21 in NaBloPoMo. 21 down, possibly 9 to go if I can be bothered)

The List

I am reaching PEAK LIST at the moment.

I am one of those people who doesn't necessarily function super well, or remember things, without a fairly detailed list to guide me. It is not a procedural document (I don't include instructions on how to do the things, or detail about them) - it's a mnemonic, but without it, things constantly slip through the cracks, and I find myself chronically underestimating how much I have left to do and how long it's going to take, and that's where the dread midnight working sessions come in. (Maaaaan, I hate those).

So I have made a pretty detailed list for the coming 7 days, and wow does it look horrific. My workload has edged above fulltime as projects enter critical stages and everyone tries to race the clock to beat end-of-year shutdowns (as my client base is universities and government, the summer lock-out is real and it causes immense pressure in November every. single. year.) Family commitments are high too, as is end of year stuff coming up. Never have I been gladder than today that I decided early on that this was not the year for me with NaNoWriMo - if THAT was on this list too, I would probably be in tears right now.

I am churning through my list - I made it three hours ago, and I do have some satisfying ticks already - but there is a long, long ways to go before I can take any rest or enjoy any reading / pop culture / creativity. As Frost puts it:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.

(This is post 20 in NaBloPoMo. 20 down, 10 to go!)

Haiku for Sunday (Poem)

heat rises; sticky,
we hunch inside beyond the sun
summer is afoot.

(This is post #19 in NaBloPoMo. 19 down, 11 to go!)

The Banana Tipping Point

 Every year in spring, there comes a week that I describe as the Banana Tipping Point. This is the first week where the heat, and more importantly humidity, gets too much for our fruit bowl bananas and they start to turn mushy long before they can be eaten.

I know we are at the banana tipping point when I can see 6+ brown spotty overripe bananas lurking below the apples and citrus, slowly but surely perfuming the air with the scent of almost-gone fruit. At this stage, the courses of action are really only two - throw them out, or bake them into something. (One of these choices must be made and implemented before fermentation, because that gets very mucky!)

So this morning, I was up first in my family and marched to the kitchen full of purpose to do something about Bananagate before the situation really slipped out of control.

I used up 5 overripe bananas and the rest of an almost empty tin of cocoa, 1.5 packets of gluten free SR flour and 2 cups of brown sugar, a hefty slug of vanilla, all my remaining eggs and a fair bit of milk, but at the end I have 24 good sized choc banana muffins, which have already provided treat breakfast and will do nicely for serving to guests and also for lunchbox snacks for the first half of next week. Being gluten free, thy won't be super edible after about Wednesday, but I am confident we can work our way through them before that!

I much prefer the baking solution rather than the chucking solution, if it is feasible to do it.

(This is post #18 in NaBloPoMo. 18 down, 12 to go!)

Pesky animals and sleep deprivation

This morning, I am grainy-eyed, nerve-trembly exhausted, and I feel a health crash lurking in the wings.

This is multi-factoral - we have some family stresses going on at the moment, plus I had a major medical appointment yesterday (went well, but the lead-up was anxious), plus the tension before the postal survey announcement, and the emotional release afterwards, took a toll.

However, a very key factor in my state of grumpy zombieness today is the extremely irritating behaviour of my cat.

With the warmer weather, Roxy (the cat) has taken to wanting to sleep outside in my covered courtyard adjacent to my bedroom. Fine, good, so far froody, right? EXCEPT. She also has a habit of deciding she wants to come inside for cuddles and "inside" water (somehow very superior to "outside" water) around 5am.

Until the last few days, she's mewed to get in, I've woken and let her in, she's had a drink, then curled up on the bed and we've both gone back to sleep. Not ideal, because it can often take me a long time to resettle when woken so far into my sleep, but borderline OK.

Her new pattern, though, is DOING MY HEAD IN.

Today, I awoke at 4:50am to her mewing. Got up, let her in, went to loo, back to bed. She had a drink from her water bowl then ... went back to door and mewed to go out again. I sighed, got up, let her out, back to bed.

Then three minutes later, she mewed to get back in again.

Rinse and repeat every 3-5 minutes for the next 45 MINUTES and I was a wet rag. Literally just as I would be starting to get sleepy, off she'd go again. I got super cross in the end and just left her in the courtyard and ignored her complaining. (I'm not a monster, she has a bed, a cathouse, food and water in the courtyard, and access to her preferred toileting zone near the front fence, so she didn't actually *need* anything).

She continued to grizzle for about 15 minutes before she finally gave up and (I assume) went back to her bed, but by then it was almost 6am and I was het up, not in a good state to sleep. I eventually did drop back off for a hectic 20-minute nap around 6:30 or so, but I am wrung out now and expect to fade severely later in the day, which is just what I do not have time to do with my current workload.

I am going to need to do something about this new behaviour. Sleep is a precarious blessing for me at the best of times, and a sooking cat is NOT going to be the reason that I do not get any and end up getting sick. I need to have a think about the best solutions to what is an increasingly troublesome problem.

(This is post #16 in NaBloPoMo. 16 down, 14 to go!)

YES we said YES we will YES

Today the results were announced in Australia's postal survey on marriage equality.

I could opine for a long age about how unnecessary, expensive, cruel and gutless it was for the government to put us all (but especially LGBTIQA people) through this nonsense. I could rage about the terribleness of the very idea that we get a vote on the civil rights of other people. I could bang on about the duplicity and moral bankruptcy that has been displayed over and over by the No campaign throughout this painful, excruciating process.

But today, none of that is my focus. None of that is what matters most. What matters most is this:

WE. SAID. YES.

To marriage equality, to legal equality for everyone, to love rather than bigotry, to families and couples and joy.

We said YES.

There is much more to this story. Many more hard roads to walk. The legislation hasn't even changed yet, let alone the social changes that will be many more years in the building.

Today? Today it's just enough, to celebrate and say, YES we say yes we will yes.

(This is post #15 in NaBloPoMo. Halfway there!)

Pictures of me

Me, 44 years old

(This is post #14 in NaBloPoMo. 14 down, 16 to go!)

A snippet of NaNo

Today I thought I'd post an excerpt from my aborted NaNoWriMo verse novel, Concept of Self. I'm in two minds about whether I'll ever go back to it - I think the idea might be not up to the weight of novel or novella length, but there might be a couple of OK-ish long poems lurking in there.

So, without further ado ... Here is a little bit of Erika, Minder-Kinetic, fighting a fire (literally) on her space repair station. Gemina is her station AI.

Now that the Bowery gate is stabilised, I slacken my chokehold on it and cast my sense around,

feeling out the ships nearest by the damage point.

There is the Ancient of Days; she’s a nickel and iridium mining girl, big in the belly, short in the stern.

She’s in hospital for a life support upgrade, but that scar of burn on her gate-side curve

does not bode well for a quick recovery.

No active flames there though, so I push on to the Amal; she’s a lighter, nimbler bird

designed to thread the needle through the showers and pick up knocked-loose platinum.

Her size has been an advantage, here; the fire seems to have caught only her delicate front bow

leaving a lace tattoo that is nothing but surface-deep.

Then – ahhhh, yes. The Ashling Gray.

Tough iron-mining grunt ship – built like the workhorse she is.

This ship has hauled metal from the Belt for the past 15 years, month in, month out;

this ship, and her captain, have also hauled out at least a dozen wrecked boats

saving crews from months-long slow deaths marooned in the Belt.

This ship brought me from my home in Mars Prima, here to Station 203-Beta

five years ago and change, now.

When I needed to hide and be no more, she gave me unsentimental refuge

made a space for me in her blocky alloyed guts, and showed me a sky

with room for me in it.

And now. Now the Ashling Gray is burning.

I throw down a suppressant layer and straightaway the fire fights me,

squirming in my mindgrip like a birth-slick pup.

That this is ground zero for the fire is beyond any doubt.

There is some sort of accelerant at play, and I can’t immediately tell what.

I’d give anything in the moment for another Kinetic.

Gemina, omnipresent as she is, cannot sense, outside of her sensors

and the Mind-Nots are of no use here, not until the fire is dead.

Think, Erika. This tricksy dancer is bile-green,

the colour of tree-moss and dart-frogs, jewel-bright and witchlike.

What makes a fire burn green, and resist?

(This is post #13 in NaBloPoMo. 13 down, 17 to go!)

A Sestina for the Ones Who Said (Poem)

This is a sestina based on the found poem idea, but with a twist to make it much harder for myself because - why not!

What I did was go to my six most visited websites (excluding social media and portals for services) and randomly select a line from what was on their front page, to form the first stanza. In order, these are:

The Guardian Australia
Ask A Manager
Captain Awkward
Gimlet Media
Girls Will Be Girls (Literary Journal)
Overland (Literary Journal)

(Yes, I am that boring OK).

So here we go ... I'm calling it A Sestina for the Ones Who Said. It's turned into a thing about the Thing, which I guess is not surprising, given the mood at the moment.

We are not very caring.
How clear are you being when you say no?
Everything is twice as hard and takes twice as long:
We go back to the time our divisions turned into war,
Not for male consumption -
I am still learning how to protect my own consent.

A twisted tangled mess where there should be consent
But to understand the depths of it requires caring:
To truly see a person, not a body for consumption.
To hear the ways in which the multitudinous No
is given: in shout or whisper; semaphore; portents of war.
The act measured in minutes, its shadow dragging long.

It feels this journey has been so long,
and so unfinished, while old men in power debate consent
and what it means. Pitching it like it is a culture war,
like the young, the vulnerable, the women are somehow wrong for caring:
like there is something mutable about the No
like resisting is revolution, an affront to consumption.

And everywhere, it's packaged for consumption:
Sex sells, and with it, the dark ideal of access; for so long
there has been permission to not hear the No.
Do we really own our own consent?
In the broken mirror, we see the shards of caring -
And power and the powerless in uneven war.

Some write polemics about a gender war,
Which is just deflection, packaged neat for angry male consumption.
The contempt that reeks for all that reflects caring:
The paradigm has held up for so long,
Regardless of the threadbare-thin consent,
We did not agree, but no-one heard the No.

The day is coming, when we'll shout the NO
and call out power and the running dogs of war
and start to learn the value of consent.
When the only thing we line up for consumption
is the food and drink we share, as days grow long
and the cruel will become weak, and all power vest in caring.

And although it hurts, we cannot turn from caring:
Power seems so firm, and yet its fall is long;
And hearts rebuild, and love usurps consumption.

- Kathy, 12/11/17

(This is NaBloPoMo post #12. 12 down, 18 to go!)

Spring (Finally!)

Critters and gardening and warm evenings and BBQ food and pasta salad made by the one kid of my three who's a reasonably keen cook.

The cat is unimpressed that her nice squishy outdoor bed of weeds has been removed, but she'll get over it. We gardened all morning and things look much more orderly now, then played Monopoly all afternoon (Team Me + 8 year old was victorious - go us!)

Not so bloody terrible, actually.

(This is post #11 in NaBloPoMo. 11 down, 19 to go!)

Flashback Friday

This is a photo post only, because the words have gone AWOL. It's a Pictures from My Life situation.

November 2003

November 2006

November 2009

November 2014

(This is post #10 in NaBloPoMo. 10 down, 20 to go!)

An Everyday Madrigal (Poem)

My friend's cat's kittens are growing daily on the Internet,
There's a ginger trio, a tortoiseshell and a dark gray;
When things are bad, I like to watch them play.

My kitchen ceiling swarms with spring bugs and I fret:
Are they flying ants or termites? Either way
I look for pictures frantically on the Internet
And read grim pest control sites backlit in gray.

My own cat thinks she's master, not a pet,
She kneads me til I crack and push her away;
She will, no doubt, strategise to make me pay.
I waste time on the Internet -
The sun is bright outside, internal climate gray
The ropes draw tight and I wait out the day.

- Kathy, 9/11/17

(This is post #9 in NaBloPoMo. 9 down, 21 to go!)