Year: 2009

sunday life: cos it’s cool to be calm

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This week I took wise counsel from a bunch of nice 22-year-old blokes in Ramones T-shirts.

On Friday night I found myself in a down-an-alley-way-up-a-rickety-staircase bar brimful with young men born since the advent of personal email. They wore winkle-pickers and their older sister’s cardigans and drank longnecks of Coopers. It felt like it was 1983; I knew the words to all the songs.

At the expense of sounding creepily like Germaine Greer (remember that weird book The Beautiful Boy in which she infatuates over barely-adult boys?), I’ve been in the company of very young men a lot lately and find them intriguingly charming. (A shout out to their mothers – you’ve done a stellar job.) I also find them curiously relaxed.

This, in spite of the fact they all seem to be juggling a crazy array of blog design start-ups, music piracy operations and 17 Twitter accounts. “Do you ever get stressed?” I asked Mike, a cherubic kid who runs two street art galleries and DJs at weekends. He adjusted his ironically dorky glasses and said, “No, because these days it’s cool to be calm”.

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sunday life: fashion and my fraud complex

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This week I make my philosophical peace with fashion.

If I may, I’d like to indulge in a run-down of my surreal fashion experience this week. It has a life-bettering point, of sorts, toward the end.

So, Wednesday I find myself tricked up with hair extensions and smoky eye, parading down a catwalk with a dozen professional models half my size and age. It was for charity and all terribly Sex and the City, specifically the episode where SJP trips over doing a charity parade in New York. Mercifully, I merely veered off course briefly, to make way for a model charging at me doing that curious “donkey gait” that models do.

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sunday life: my interesting chat with a boxer

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This week I drink chai with a man who used to beat people to a pulp for a living, to see if he knows how to make life better.*

There’s this thing I’ve been doing for a while now. Every fortnight I invite an interesting stranger to share a cup of tea or a wine, so I can learn more about how this mortal coil spins. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. One time it might be an academic I admire. The next a disagreeable blogger I want to understand better, or a work contact I’ve only ever dealt with via email who I keep saying I should actually meet some time. Some time never happens, of course, unless you got off your bum.

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sunday life: in which i declutter my books

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This week I had a good hard think about why I have kept an unread copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace on my bookshelf for 17 years.  This small awakening prompted a frenzied decluttering of dead wood*. Small awakenings can do this.

I’ve been on a decluttering mission lately. This latest chapter was prompted by my appearing in one of those magazine lifestyle shoots, “At Home with ….”. You know, the ones where the subject nurses a mug of coffee at their kitchen island in one shot. And snuggles up on the couch in distressed jeans and bare feet in another.

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sunday life: how to do an e-tox

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This week I officially, no false-run-ups-about-it, start my e-tox. To see if banishing email addiction makes life cleaner, more elegant and, straight up, better*.

I had this revelation recently: my relationship with email is not unlike one I once had with a particularly clingy guy. This guy – let’s call him Outlook – constantly demanded to know where I was and why hadn’t I replied to his barrage of messages, and, no, it’s no excuse I was out with friends because I had Blackberry. He expected acknowledgement of all attention-seeking communications, even when there was no dignified answer available (“Um, glad you were just thinking of me”; “Oh, yes, there it is, another smiley emoticon!”). And he’d ping when he walked in the room. Although I think that was more the cumulative sound of my every pore bristling.

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sunday life: in which i have a colonic!!!!

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This week I have a colonic… to make life better.

My mum didn’t know what a colonic was, so I’ll spell it out without tempting euphemism. I went to a place dressed up in white porceline as a clinic (down an alleyway, up some stairs, pretending to look for the Dentists’ Guild of Australia or some such) and had someone flush my bowels with xx L of water using a hose up the jaxy.

My mum also couldn’t comprehend why someone would do such a thing, so I’ll paint a loose picture. Most people who aim to be healthy eat too much crap in spite of themselves. Crap builds up. It sticks to our insides and blocks stuff, including the absorption of nutrients. So we eat more crap because we feel crap. Ergo, a crap rut. The moderation route back to good habits seems so dreary and long for this generation of insta-fix-its. Ergo, the hose.

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sunday life: how gratefulness helps my life

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In the aftermath of the recent MasterChef finale, I want to share one special observation with you. Just after she was announced winner you’ll recall Julie told everyone – the contestants, the chefs, me, the judges, the crew – how grateful she was we’d helped change her life.

On set we’d stoically held it together to that point. But this, well, this released something burning and goosepimply in the collective. And we all burst into tears, like a finger had been pulled from the hole in the bulging dyke.

Tom cried. George cried. So did Manu the grande boeuf-y French chef, and the cameramen. I cried and from what I hear, it was at this precise moment everyone at home watching cried. It was awkward, but oddly liberating, yeah?

The same, I hear, happens in footy changerooms after big matches. I love it. The captain gives his rousing thank you speech and the players, almost on cue, cry. Geelong captain Tom Harley told me about it recently: “We don’t cry any other time. Something weird and deep happens…I don’t know what it is.”

I do. It’s The Gratitude Effect.

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sunday life: in which I learn to sleep

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This week I went to the foundations of a life better lived and road-tested sleep. You know, to see if this mortal coil is sweeter with it.

I’ve spent vast tracts of my life not sleeping. I went for five months in my early twenties on 2-3 hours a night. It turned me, almost literally, into a teapot. Then I had a phase where I’d wake at 3.25am. I’d fret and turn the pillow over and over looking for the cool side until the Currawongs drawled that lonely, first-light wauk-wauk-waaugh, a sound that sends us insomniacs into a tizz. It heralds the point of no returning to sleep. Throw in the blanket. Day is officially here.

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