Funeral

A Jewish burial is very simple. The body is covered in a white cloth and placed on straw in a raw wood coffin. There is a short graveside sermon, then you eat.

A limo drove Dad, the Caribbean ladies and myself to the cemetery on Long Island. (I can’t believe my first ride in a limo was to a funeral.) Being the end of winter meant that everything was dead and brown, and the grounds looked barren and dried up. Not somewhere one would want to return.

Once there, Dad had to lift the lid of the coffin and identify the body. Thankfully, it was Ada’s. I can’t imagine what happens when there’s a fuck up.

As per tradition, they lowered the coffin into the ground immediately, then the congregation shovel in a scoop of dirt each. This was done before any words were spoken, and there was nothing beautiful about it. It felt very weird. Dad was given the shovel first, and to my mortification got a bit carried away and shovelled in two scoops. If I hadn’t of yelled “just one” to him, he probably would have kept going.

Then the Rabi spoke for about ten minutes, Dad said some words (and shed some tears) and we left. It was cold, and for a ten minute sermon the Rabi charged $450. I’m sure Ada was turning in her grave.

Before we left, T - Ada’s night nurse, looked towards the grave said “You are in front; we are behind.”  These words were a comfort to hear, not because I want to follow, but because of the inevitability of it.

I wasn’t sad at the funeral. My body turned on it’s asperges as a means of protection. Then I slowly let it sink in on the car ride back.

That night Dad and I went to three Jazz bars; we drank, we danced, we celebrated life.

Billie Holiday

 Photo credit: Gottlieb, William P

March

Ada's Kitchen

I’ve been staying in Ada’s apartment on my own ever since she passed away. It was strange at first; not wanting to sit in her chair, impulsively disinfecting things before I touched them. Then slowly tidying up. Sorting through a life-time of clutter, and the weird questions… “what do we do with her teeth?!”

Thankfully Dad flew over and stayed for five days to help sort her affairs out.

I’m not sure how much longer I can stay here. I predict I will get kicked out soon enough, but for now I'm truly enjoying living on my own for the very first time ever.

February

February was the month I turned 30. The month I’d been in New York for two years… and then out of no where, except maybe old age, it was the month Ada died.

She died shortly after a stroke which brought her to hospital, where she remained sedated until she passed on.

A candle now burns in her apartment, but her spirit is definitely gone. Gone far far away from here and hopefully to the place she had been yearning to go for so many years. 

 the lioness herself.

Windy Walk

Last night I was feeling blue for no real reason as I walked along 14th street in the freezing gail force wind. Then a huge piece of sheet wood the size of a cubical wall came hurtling towards me like I was in the middle of a hurricane. I pressed myself up against the wall braced for it to hit and then the large window of the HSBC bank a meter beside me exploded out onto the street.

Luckily the piece of wood missed, and there was no one directly infront of the window when it shattered, but had I been two steps infront of myself I would have been hit, and somehow felt like I'd cheated death. (Kind of like Ricky Gervais in Ghost town, when he dodges the falling airconditioning unit... until he steps onto the curb and get hit by a bus).

What does this mean?

Video - It Get's Better

Just quickly, the amazingly talented improviser Becky Drysdale (who I was lucky enough to do one of her classes) has made this awesome video to help lgbtq kids everywhere. I would have totally been in the background of this if I didn't have to work.

Euro Holiday

Just over a week ago, a friend here told me it would cost the same amount to fly to LA as it would to Paris for thanksgiving. On Monday we booked our tickets, and today I fly to Paris.

It's been a long long dream of mind to go to Europe - especially Paris, and I'd always been waiting to do it properly - as in for a long period of time. But stuff it. 4 days will have to do.

Sooooo excited!

Brunch for One

This morning I hastened to leave Anya's as I picked up my bag that I'd left there the night before. While I love her company, and her sun soaked apartment with potatoes boiling on the stove, and gossip girl playing in the background, I still yearned to be somewhere... dining by myself.

Ten minutes later, in a wooded restaurant around the corner, I sit at the bar awash with Miles Davis. A lady beside me spreads her paper and ordered eggs, a lady behind me takes out her novel and sips her coffee. Brunch for one all round please.

Outside the crisp cool air reminds me of those sunny but cold Toowoomba days. My coat is on the back of my chair, my scarf still around my neck. I feel very lucky. The change of season can only truly be embraced once you stop and observe it -  preferably quietly, over a cup of tea and a plate of eggs benedict.

Photo credit: My Cup of Tea

Dad Joke

When talking to my father about Ada's incontinence problem, he said "Well, I guess shit happens."
Long pause while he laughs at his own joke.

I Love You (An Awkward Family Moment)

The first time I recall my father ever saying the words “I love you” to us kids was when I was 14 and my brother was J-Rad 12. We were driving back from a Church on a Sunday night (our family liked to "dabble" in Christianity for curiosity’s sake) and were discussing weather we agreed with tonight’s service or not. After a comfortable silence, Dad glanced back at us and said matter-of-factly: “Kids, I love you.” This segued nicely into a very uncomfortable silence. So he continued - “I know we never say it to each other, but we should be able to, and I’d like to hear you say it back.”

J-Rad and I had frozen - stupefied in the back seat. It’s not that we didn’t know he loved us it’s just, as he said, we had never been in the habit of expressing it this way. Maybe you come from a family like that. Or maybe your family is not very affectionate or has other quirks and rituals. Each to their own really. Love is more about actions than it is about words, so saying them out loud felt unnecessary. Like being hit over the head with a giant fish. 

I remember in that moment feeling a mixture of both pleasant surprise and severe nausea. The same feelings one gets when watching an episode Seventh Heaven. Finally I made the first move, and muttered quickly: “I love you too.” It was weird, and I was relieved to have it over and done with. J-Rad just sat there refusing to say it - likely contemplating a jump and roll from our moving vehicle. “No I’m not saying it!” he said.

In the years that followed that awkward conversation, both my Dad and my Step-Mum continued to say it every now and again. We noticed the ease with which our step-siblings would return the words – even initiating it at the end of their phone conversations. 

Gradually it became a more natural way to articulate the love we felt, without needing to gag. I even tried it out on Mum and her side of the family, who would freeze, not knowing what to say back. “Rito, yes, bye – uh, you too,” Nanny would say - taken by surprise if I used it on the phone.

A few months ago, I received a letter from Nanny in the mail telling me about J-Rad’s new job offer in Sydney:

The last thing J-Rad said to me when he brought his things here from his unit … [he was going traveling]. He kissed me and gave me a hug and said he loved me. How lucky I am to have a grandson like him and a granddaughter like you. We are so blessed.

It made my eyes water reading it. For a family who rarely knew how to verbalize love so freely, we are all doing a grand job of it now. I’m grateful to Dad for his courageousness in opening that door to us as teens, and the persistence it took to change our families habits. We certainly don't over use it. But we can say it when we want to, without feeling too weird.

So there it is dearest fam. I love you.

photo credits:Aurigid meterorite #2 Ice cased Adelie Pengins The future is bright

Fashion's Night Out #2

Is it too late to blog about Fashion’s Night Out?... Good.

It was pretty rad - and not because of the fashion, but because there was a man in the Louis Vitton store window licking a LV handbag - slowly and sensually.

It was 10pm when I got there, and I watched him for a good ten minutes. Had he been licking the handbag since 7pm? I wish I’d arrived there earlier!

The rest of the night was really just an insane battling of crowds. EXCEPT for Sarah Silverman's performance at the Mac Makeup store in Soho at 8pm. It was worth the wait (I lined up for over an hour). She signed a free copy of her awesome book The Bedwetter, and also sang a song where the only lyric in the refrain was ‘cunt.’ Bless her!

Here's some more pics:

 Manic crowds outside Bergdorf Goodman

Dolls of designers at Barney's

If you could get inside the LV store, men were dancing on the staircase. 

Desert!

It was a good night, but a little overwhelming to try and plan. With a gazillion celebrities and at least an hours wait to see just one, you really have to chose your favorite and be satisfied with that. By 9:30pm most of the free drinks have dried up and the crowds on the streets are a nightmare. But it's kind of awesome to have this kind of crazed atmosphere that doesn't revolve around a sporting event. Go fashion!

Poor Harry

My mum’s a vegan. She’s turned my step-dad vegan and more recently his adorable collie-dog, Harry vegan as well.

I remember when she told me over the phone one day “Harry’s a vegan now.” She was thrilled. I thought about this for a moment, and wanted to say - “Well is Harry really a vegan? Or is he being forced into it? Like did you convince him to turn or was it like - eat vegetables and rice, or starve.” The ironic thing is, when I ask mum why she’s a vegan, (apart from the environmental impact) it’s mainly because she doesn’t like to be cruel to animals. 

Cocktails and Suicide

Last month I caught up with an old friend (Pat) at a rooftop bar over cocktails and… a suicide.

(new rooftop bar in Hell's Kitchen)

Pat and I had met eight years ago in our early twenties, teaching English in China. She was mourning the death of a close friend in a drowning accident, and I was mourning the completion of a three year business degree that I had no desire to use. There we found ourselves working for a dodgy Chinaman, eating boiled chicken’s feet and being treated like celebrities, all because of the colour of our skin. When we try and tell other about the craziness that goes on in China, they don't seem to care.

“I forget I can talk to you about this stuff,” Pat said. I sipped my martini staring out at the lights of Manhattan and thinking about skinned goats, when a large dark object fell from above and over the edge of the deck. It was about the size of a miniature grand piano, which I vainly hoped it was, but when people rushed over to the edge of the glass, they confirmed it was a person.

We were too short to see over the ledge, but the tall guy next to us said they had landed on the road in front of a cab – that had stopped just in time.  People across the road were frozen in their tracks. Most got on their phones to call 911, and within two minutes we could hear and see sirens heading towards the hotel. On the rooftop, we all became instant buddies bonded by tragedy. We talked to one another about what we’d seen, and made facial expressions that read “eeek” and “how sad.”

The horrible thing was, when we looked up, we could clearly see where they would have jumped from. The penthouse was only one floor above, and set about 5 meters back, overlooking all the action in the bar. How long had they stood up there? How terrible that no one had seen them. Also, how did they propel them selves far enough to clear the bar area?

After a while my morbid curiosity won out against my fear of gore, and I asked one of the staff members near me if I could stand on the chair to have a  look at the body.

“No. You’re not allowed,” he said, moving the chair away. Fair enough.

We waited before going downstairs, where staff ushered us out the side door. Police tape now surrounded the hotel, and in the distance flashing lights reflected off the white sheet that covered the body.

***

Later that night, in a different borough and after many a bar / much saki / vodka from teacups and random acts of dancing, we remembered the roof-top.

“You know 16 floors is not very high,” said Pat. “If  you’re going to go, why not go skydiving and just not pull the shoot. That’s what I’d do.” 

That was not a lie. Pat is a living poster child for a Pepsi-max commercial. As long as I’ve known her, she has always lived life "to the max." She's practically a full-time snowboarder, and since China she’s: studied film, been married, divorced, lived in Canada, NewZealand and Paris, and she’s younger than me. Currently she has a crush on her tattoo artist who designed a giant quill feather dripping in ink that spans her right rib cage and ends at her pelvic bone. (It actually looks rather elegant.)

Even that night, in the sushi restaurant which was empty and dead, she’d pointed to every single picture on the menu page and ordered one of each.

“I love picture menus!” she exclaimed, pointing to a picture of a saki flask. 

It seems kind-of ironic that I took a someone so full of life to bar where another person decided to end theirs.  But I'm glad I was with her, as we were able to turn the night around. Next year she plans to move  here to study again. This time - jewellery design.

Boom!

Guess who’s never buying another handbag again… in her life.

Regardless that it was on sale, it still feels ridiculously expensive. So much so, that I’m embarrassed that I bought it. But obviously not embarrassed enough not to blog about it. Hmmm. Perhaps because if you know how long and far I’ve looked for a bag, you’d see why I either had to buy it, or cut off my left ear to keep sane.

Feelings post purchase:

-       Guilt.  What about the starving people in the world who would kill to eat a good looking handbag like this. Why don’t I do the right thing and send it to them? But seriously, valuing this over important things like health insurance cannot be wise.

-       Delight! It looks and feels good, and I know it will last. Investment piece!

-       Dissonance. Of course it’s not perfect. I would have liked it to have segments inside, a thicker shoulder strap - and more compartments all round. (I can feel a rant coming.)

-       Sick... to my stomach, when lying in bed that night. I could have bought 3 Broadway tickets for Ada's nurses instead of this handbag. Selfish, selfish selfish!

-       Stress. After the water-proof spray was applied, the color looked like a burnt orange, rather than tan.

-       Relief. The next morning two ladies at the hairdresser, hair dye still in hair, got out of their chairs, bent down and worshipped my bag. The outside validation helped.

I do realize that when it comes to shopping, I am my own worst enemy and need to chillax.

I did have some help finding this bag. I emailed the lovely Jane Flanagan at the wonderful blog: ill seen, ill said -because I had a great bag on her website. She was very helpful in recommended a tonne of bags and where to find them – including the one I just bought. (Thanks Jane!)

Thoughts on Evil

For the longest possible time (until I was 26) I didn’t believe in evil. I thought that all people were essentially good on the inside, and reasons for evil in the world were due to people reacting badly to their circumstances and making bad choices. Essentially I believed they could all be ‘helped’ and even ‘healed.’ After all, no body wants to grow up to be a child molester or serial killer… do they? *

In 2006 – out of nowhere, I somehow realized that evil exists in varying degrees within all of us. There was no single event that changed my perspective on this, just a gradual understanding that was quite shocking at the time, which is why I remember the year. Perhaps it was because I had also observed that sometimes people don’t change, no matter how hard they try. (Another devastating blow to my beliefs.) 

You cannot deny that to a certain extent we all have some hard wiring within us, and that some people are simply born with a large heart, a wicked streak or a sense of humour. That’s not to say that nurture doesn’t have any impact or that people can’t change. It definitely does, and they definitely do. But that year, I could no longer ignore the fact, that human beings are capable of being malicious – continually, despite their intentions and even despite other good actions.

I recently found this quote which illustrates my thoughts exactly:

How else can you explain the history of the world?

For an interesting read on this topic and the powers of ‘group think’, check out the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Scary - although not completely surprising.

I feel fortunate that I've had no direct reason to ever really believe in evil, and I hope this post is not a downer. I just think that by acknowledging human nature's true capabilities to myself, that I am better armed to make choices and to question decisions that will contribute to the future history of the world.

(Actually, in the case of pedophilia, Oprah has proven it’s a mental illness people suffer -which is why they will always re-offend, again and again and again.)

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! 

J.Crew Tail

Today I popped into J.Crew after a manic day at work, hoping to find something/anything that would fit the "casual chic" dress code of a film soirée tomorrow night. (work thing.)

It was only ten minutes before close, and once inside, the door man came up to me with an apologetic face. I stopped him and said: "I know, I know - you guys close in 10 minutes - I'll be quick!"
"No mam," he said hesitantly. "There's toilet paper coming out your pants."

I prayed it was just stuck to the bottom of my shoe, but when I turned around I saw a good foot and a half of it hanging out the top of my skinny black pants like a long tail. (!!?!)

I quickly stuffed it in my handbag, like that was a perfectly normal place to put toilet paper.
"Thank you," I managed in a surprisingly dignified voice, as I continued to browse the racks.

I had just walked two blocks down Fifth Avenue and crossed at the lights to get here. As my dear friend  Liz would call it - Fashion Road-kill.