Trippin on Natural Causes

I’ve never been around someone on acid or mushrooms, but I can imagine it would be similar to being around my great-aunt Ada this week. Every now and then, she hallucinates very vividly. This time her ‘trip’ lasted three whole days.

 “Oh! Someone else is here!” She exclaimed looking at the blanc space in front of the the door.

“Who?” we asked.

“There is somebody here!” she insisted, and then turned to the left and started clawing at something in the air beside her. “What is this? What is it?” she kept saying.

It didn’t bother me. I felt like it was just her brain giving these messages to her eyes. But her night nurse T gave me a knowing look, and said “She’s been calling out for the dead, you know. Looking for her Mother,  her sister and her husband, and seeing a little girl,” which is apparently common for the elderly to do.
“They are coming for her, you know.”

All of Ada’s Caribbean aids believe in, and have a bit of an unexplained psychic ability. Jean, her day nurse sometimes tells me how she was at home in Brooklyn when she knew something bad had happened to Ada so came around early – it turned out Ada had had a stroke. T’s sister (a more specific psychic) will call and tell her when people they know of have died - before anyone else knows.

During the rare occasions that Ada hallucinates, she doesn’t sleep. Her eyes may roll back, or dart back and forth when she rests, but she continues to move and babble in a mixture of Polish and English, cycling through different moods and emotions. It’s like she is possessed.

One night she got up and shuffled out whaling and sobbing “No! Don’t, please! No! They are coming. Ahhh!” It was very dramatic, like she was in a stage play doing a torture scene. On the third night, she finally collapsed in into sleep, one arm hanging off the edge of the bed, like she had passed out drunk, her body occasionally twitching with nervous impulses. We dared not move her, lest we wake her up again.

It seems the kinder thing to do when she gets like this, would be to give her a couple of valium after the first day. Id’ asked her psychiatrist previously about this, but she had wanted to increase the amount of anti-psychotic pills she takes, which only seem to take effect after a few days – and then they turn Ada into a dopey, sleepy mess who forgets how to walk and talk.

It feels like the process of growing old and dying in her case, is a long drawn out and laborious one. A natural phenomena that is not entirely unlike the process of being borne into the world.  I do sometimes wonder though, if Ada should have had that heart surgery years earlier, or if the tens of pills we give her every day are prolonging her life against natures will.

Week in Review #2

This week…

• I got caught masturbating by 'T' – Ada's night nurse.
• Caught a cold. 
• Saw Ray Lamontagne and David Grey in concert. 

• Listened to “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine -  63 times
• Went on my never ending search for the perfect handbag. (Have you seen it? It’s tan, good quality leather, costs less than a house, but fits a house inside... shoulder strap... many compartments… I could go on.)

• Realized that I look for men like I look for handbags, so I could be looking for quite a while.
• Finished “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Loved it.
• Watched two people kissing for over half an hour at a bar. Told all the guys I was with to take note because “This is how you kiss a girl!” then when they stood up, we realized they were two girls. Figures.

• Saw Eat Pray Love – and it was exactly how I thought it would be. Also I bought stuff from the set sale, and wanted to see if any of it was featured in the film. (a teacup was.)
• Lay in bed next to Ada until 4pm on Sat! But got over my cold.
• Thought for the millionth time – what am I doing with my life?
• Hand washed those delicates I’ve been meaning to get to for 3 weeks.
• Enrolled in an improv class that’s out of my league.
• Indulged my addiction to Hibiscus tea.
• Got bullied into getting a Brazilian wax when all I wanted was a bikini. It was painful, but it’s been a while.

What I learned?

When you condense a week into a list it sounds cooler and more productive than it felt when you lived it.

Buried Treasure

I once met someone, who lost her mother to cancer when she was young.  Her father loved her mother so much, that when it came time to bury her, he couldn’t remove any of her jewelry. In fact, he buried her with all the jewelry he had ever given her. So my friend never got to inherit what could have been some very special accessories. It’s kind of sad and a waste, but it’s also very very sweet, and if you’re a romantic like me, it’s the stuff of fairytales. It just intrigues me that somewhere buried under the earth is some beautiful jewelry that may never see the light of day again.

Buried Adventures

(Australian bush)

Buried beneath a tree, in a small suburban park in Middle Ridge, Toowoomba, lies a tin can sealed with glad-wrap. (Unless it has been unearthed and thrown away). And inside this can, is a golf ball and a piece of paper with the details of an “adventure” that my best friend Lindsay White and I had, one weekend when we were ten.

In reality, our “adventures” were lame forest explorations followed by some mild trespassing, but at the time they were heart stopping, adrenalin-pumping voyages into the unknown. We'd explore the unchartered bush at the top of The Great Dividing Range, and name important landmarks after ourselves, then follow the pony trail until it was time to trespass.  

We'd sneak through stranger's yards using stealth like moves - like running, and hiding and stuff, until we could make it to the safety of the road. We thought if we were caught, we'd probably go to jail, because people would think we were "robbers" and trespassing was illegal.

The day we buried the time capsual, we found a golf ball in our travels and decided to document our adventure so that many years into the future, someone would  discover the tin and learn something about our culture.

I'd picture them, post apocalypse, saying "How did they do it? A ball with perfect little dimples. The ancient people of Toowoomba were a sophisticated race." And then "Honey, did you know that stream down the road is actually called the Lind-ally River?"

For two years that followed we kept returning to the park to make sure the tin was still there. Then I moved away and Lindsay and I went to separate high-schools and sadly lost touch. But I know where the park is and I think I can still picture the exact tree where it's buried. One day, perhaps in our 80's, I'll go visit Lindsay who lives in Toowoomba and we’ll walk the streets we used to roam as kids, go back to that tree, and start digging to check if it's still there. 

New Yorkba

It seems like where ever I go these days, I run into someone I know. “Well then move the hell out of Toowoomba!” I hear you say. Well I did, and now I’m in one of the most densely populated places in the world (if you don’t count all of Asia, and many other cities around the world), and I expect to feel anonymous, and not worry about being a big daggy tourist when you have a bunch of Aussie girl-friends come visit. Yeaaaah! Which is where I’ve been of late. (There, and also being absolutely cained at work.)

NYC certainly turned on it's charm for the Brissy ladies. Thanks to the genius website – onlocations vacations (thanks Liz!), we snuck into the premier party of a new Kevin Klien movie, which also stars Katie Holmes and John C. Reilly (only Kevin showed up.)

Here’s the trick to getting past the door girls on the carpet with the list: Get there early. Too early for them to have their list out.  Then simply walk past them like you’re part of it all. We were lucky and because we weren’t even expecting to get in, our night just kept getting better.

“How much are the cocktails?” I asked, eyeing the list as we casually approached the bar.

“Why, they’re complimentary.” said the bar man, turning a blind eye to our poka-tourist faces.

“We’ll take 5.”

And really, that’s how the night went on. We gave our selves fake job titles in production, in case anyone asked (which makes no sense, seeing as we all work in post,) and for some reason the waitresses just loved us. The head wait-lady kept coming up to our table, which at all times had two full martini glasses in-front of each girl, to ask if we’d like another. She even gave us a round of absinth cocktails.

Needless to say, we got trashed, and the food kept coming, and we got our photos taken by papratzi, met Magda (Mirnda’s nurse from Sex and the City, who called us a table of hot ladies), saw a runner up from America’s next top model, and one of us – who’s favourite movie is Life As a House, managed to touch Kevin Kline’s jacket.

All of this - on their first night here, and the next day was even more New York! We got to see rats in the subway – and a squirrel in the park! 

Then on the girl's last day, we saw Justin Timberlake walking down 5^th Ave, as he filmed his new movie - Friends With Benefits. 

It was cool, but he had nothing compared to the appeal of squirrels. 

God – those squirrels! How do they move so quick?! And what’s with the long bushy tails! Why are they so rad?

We had a lot of fun, and I’m exhausted, but I can’t stop going out. They've given me summer fever, and the world is shrinking every day. 

I remember watching SATC and thinking - that's such crap that people can just run into people they know like that on the street. And then one of my Brissy girls -  while strolling through the West Village, ran into a boy she kissed on a dance floor in the East Village, 2 nights prior. Rock on Yorkvegas! 

Squirrels!