hip, hip…

As you may have caught in the ever-shifting flow of news on Facebook, the date is now set for the surgical replacement of my right hip  – 29th January. I’m pleased – that’s less waiting time between the deciding and the doing than I expected. I actually could’ve had January 4, but I enjoy the swimming/sunbathing/partying/relaxing traditions of a Sydney summer too much to so incapacitate myself at the height of it. I’d rather spend January limping and grumbling in the sun than under fluoros doing physio – and hydrotherapy is a long way short of surf and sand – so the end of January is perfect.

My surgeon is Dr Michael O’Sullivan, who does all the ex-dancers and athletes, and pretty much only does hips. We’ll be at the Mater, according to their website “the largest and one of the most respected orthopaedic surgical hospitals in the Southern Hemisphere, performing over 1,500 joint replacements every year”. I’ll be checking in on the 28th and staying 5 or 6 days. Do come and visit – I plan to be an exceptionally lively patient.

coming home to strangeness

I’m home, but I’m in a strange state. It’s 11.30pm, the plane got in after eight but it took me a couple of hours to get from the airport to Redfern.

That was fun… not. Just under a week ago my bank got wind that my debit card details “may have been compromised” and cancelled the damn thing. My financial lifeline in Europe, you understand. I survived on friend credit (fredit? A froan?) as far as the boarding gate, and I had AUD$10 in my wallet.

Not enough for a cab, though I thought I might be able to share one. But the first cabbie I approached with that plan demanded 75% of the fare, which is his right by law, but he was unpleasantly aggro about it and I hadn’t, at that point, the resilience to keep trying. I was hoping to avoid the train because it meant changing at Central and hauling my bags up 30 steps at Redfern. So I investigated the bus. ‘Investigated’ in this context means queued for, since signage at the airport bus/coach stops is minimal and information non-existent, and after 15 minutes along came a bus whose driver said I needed the 400, which would be along in another 15 minutes, and I’d have to change at Mascot shops and cross the road for the 309. I reconsidered the train, in case it came sooner, but it turns out the train fare on that rip-off private line is over $15. Back to the bus.

A journey by car, planes, and buses that began at 9.30 GMT yesterday ended sometime after 22.00 EST tonight with me collapsing into a chair on the terrace, crumb of herbal anaesthetic in hand. No-one was home, but the new presence is everywhere evident in little differences, someone else’s stuff. Where is Casey? Is he coming home tonight? Is he hiding out? Does he even expect me? I really should’ve Facebook messaged him, I realise after a while, because I don’t have his phone number. This is a little weird.

And so I unpack my laptop and set up, but though it tells me I’m connected to my wireless network, Firefox can’t find anything; Skype won’t open, I’m just not online. I plug in, but it’s not that. A problem with my ISP? I don’t know if I even have their phone number, and I’m too sore and tired to go look for it. Worse, I’ve put my Australian SIM back in my phone but my credit’s expired, and I can only top up online. Worse still, like an idiot I months ago let myself be booked to model tomorrow afternoon, and of course with no phone credit the SOS texts I tried to send this evening to organise a replacement wouldn’t have gone. I’ll have to call the models tomorrow morning, because at the moment, my only means of communication is the landline and it’s a little late to be making calls.

Suddenly, I’m strangely isolated. I can’t even call the people I should. All I can do is write – offline – about coming home to strangeness. And try to reassemble the thoughts I had while away, about coming back.

It’s 1am. I’ve cooked and eaten a bowl of noodles, by my calculations my sixth light meal in about 32 hours. I’m tired and buzzy; and I’ve finished the chocolate. I should try to sleep.

Oh yeah. Don’t worry, I do plan to write about the trip, the whole trip (though don’t expect ‘nothing but’) – but at the moment I just have scattered notes, so bear with me while I construct and reconstruct, over the coming days and weeks. Each section will have its moment, backdated to its time. Do backdated entries show up on an RSS feed? Keep me posted.

touched by the dark side

Some seriously nasty shit is going down over at the construction site zensiren.com… do get a screenshot of the fake escort service – it’ll be a collector’s item one day.

Don’t ask me who’s responsible; I would prejudice my case if I threw around unproven accusations. The battle is likely to be messy, but we must prevail, for the children. Lucky bluehigh’s on my side.

tedia

I used the word ‘tedia’ in conversation …then paused, and said ‘I think I just made that up.’ We googled it: plenty of Tedia as company names and such, but no Wikipedia entry and when we added the define command it couldn’t. So, subject to whatever a more rigorous search may turn up, I hereby define tedia as: pl. of tedium, meaning (a/the range of) tedious things and/or events.

The sentence I found myself using it in went something like this: Paying those parking fines is just one of the tedia I have to deal with this week.

Please feel free to comment about your own tedia, so that the Wiktionary entry Stuart encouraged me to write can refer back here to more than one usage example.

this is the other one

proportions not classical

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

A doctor at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s Rachel Forster Breast Clinic syringed my lump and decreed it harmless.

But he found another dark area on the ultrasound which he decided was of concern, so he took a biopsy of that and I have to call back in a week for the results.

I refused to have a mammogram. The stats for detection by mammogram are a 90% success rate, for ultrasound 80%, but I’m under 50 with one small lump and no history of cancer either personally or in the family, and a mammogram is unpleasant for anyone but really painful if you have small hard breasts. I had to put my foot down; the doctor who did my initial exam tried that chiding voice they use when they assume their science and statistics unquestionably overrule your personal issues. She used it again afterwards to tell me she couldn’t guarantee that I didn’t have cancer, and I resisted saying a 90% detection rate’s no guarantee either, lady. Thanks, I thought, but I’ll make the choice about when it’s necessary for me to go through that. It may be next week, but it wasn’t today.

I’m sore enough from three needles being jabbed and wiggled about.

picking up the thread

the longer i leave it the worse it gets… here we go.

forgive me readers for i have been slack. it’s been several weeks since my last blog, and even when i stopped (for good reason: i was incommunicado in the wilds of tasmania) there was stuff overdue. much of it will now never see the light of day, i guess, and half the delay comes now from confusion about where to start… this blogging shit is a burden, damnit.

okay. the most urgent obligation is to my tafe documentation, so if you read me for the more salacious and entertaining aspects of my life i’m afraid i have to keep you hanging a little longer. keep checking back – and remember, i backdate, so check the categories at left for new entries.

backlog

i know; it’s too long since i’ve blogged. the trouble is, the more happens in your life, the more you feel you should publish, but the less time you have to write. i have a mental blogjam… i’ll get to it; just bear with me a few more days.

16-hour days

How did this happen? Everything looks so promising for a while, then somehow it veers round another corner and suddenly it’s spiralling out of control. Again.

I’m on my, um… fourth, it must be (excuse me, I’m a little fried), yes, my fourth 16-hour day in a row. I get up in the morning, eat while squeezing in an hour at the computer, blogging – tafe documentation, not recreational – or trying to keep the unread emails in my inbox below 200, then I rush off to work or school. I have half an hour for lunch unless I’m travelling job-to-job or job-to-school, in which case I might have more time but less relaxation. When school finishes I get a dinner-and-travel break that usually involves an hour’s peak hour travel (such a pleasure) and some sort of cheap, makeshift meal. I get home from the evening job around 10-10.30pm, and sometimes there’s homework to finish for the following day, or domestic business to sort. I’m behind with some of the tafe work I should be doing, especially vocal workouts and the blog documentation, but I haven’t time to scratch. I’m not getting to the pool often enough either (the aim is 3x a week but I’m making only once or twice, which means receding fitness levels). By the weekend there’s so much stuff banked up to do that I’m no less busy.

Last night I went to bed fractious and teary as a baby with sheer fatigue. Poor Drew is pretty patient with me and helps where he can, though he’s wrestling with dramas of his own at the moment. I woke this morning little better, after dreaming all night of giving succour to an overworked and overtired Madonna (she was in Australia incognito, resting… I dream of her whenever I’m struggling with career issues and my own limits; it’s embarrassing but there it is. I wrote a song about the first one… it was called Frankenmadonna. I can’t see Madge taking to it…). All I could think when I woke this morning was, ‘I need another two hours sleep.’

Well, I didn’t quite make it through the day as scheduled. I began to feel kind of surreally, dangerously fatigued around lunchtime, making my way from work to the afternoon tafe session. I started to worry that I would do something stupid; step out in front of traffic, put my bag down somewhere and walk away from it, go mad in the street. I fought the idea of skipping class and going home, remembering I was handing in the paperwork for a group assignment today. So I went to class, sat in a daze up the back till the first break, then handed in the assignment and went all wobbly explaining my state to the teacher. He very wisely sent me home, so I got a couple of hours sleep before rousing myself to go out to the evening modelling booking.

And so another day ends. It’s 10.18pm by the clock on the platform as I wait for the train home, which, true to Cityrail form, is running 25 minutes late. People gather grumbling, the announcements go on inanely, the electronic signs keep changing. The timetable is shot again; trains are out of order and off schedule. The train that was announced to be 25 minutes late is now 37 minutes late and counting. Last announcement said it ’should be here pretty soon.’ As I write, another announcement pipes up about ‘the train on platform 2′ but there is no train on platform 2. It turns up a few minutes later and I hop on it, leaving the crowd still waiting glumly for the one on the other line, now almost three quarters of an hour late. Late-stage capitalism: i’m lovin’ it.

documentation and destruction

Yesterday I realised that in my last demoralising brush with Social Security (“see the trouble is, Ms Pascoe, you’re not unemployed, you’re underemployed – you’ve got work, just not enough to survive. So we can’t help you. Not unless you give up what you do and promise to take any job you’re offered…”) I threw away some Very Important Documents. By accident.

The evil desk gnomes at Centrelink gave me a showbag (is that an Australocentric term? A showbag is the plastic carrybag of goodies you can buy from various stalls at the Royal Easter Show, an annual ‘agricultural’ fair. They used to be free product samples and cheap plastic toys, now they’re expensive garbage from transnational snack food corporations (and cheap plastic toys), but then it’s not much about agriculture any more either…) yes, a veritable showbag of doom – pamphlets and printed info sheets, booklets and flyers and 550 fucking forms to fill out, all of it immeasurably depressing and some of it deliberately frightening.

They also wanted almost as much paper from me – birth certificates and rental leases and bank statements and documentation of every conceivable sort… you can see what’s coming. It all ended up in the showbag as I walked home from the city crying, having promised to give up the half-successful small business I’d established as an independent artist and take any shit full-time work that was offered. It took me 24 hours to come to my senses enough to realise I still had other options, and another week to work up the courage and compose a pleading letter to the relevant members of my patient and endlessly supportive family. But in the end I didn’t have to rely on the ever-dwindling largesse of an ever-more-demanding Government.

All this was 12 months ago, but the plastic bag of ugliness got dumped in a corner while I developed the intestinal resources to use the one useful form in it to apply for a Health Care Card, while knowing I didn’t have sufficient proof of income to satisfy the desk nazis. (I never actually did get to that, come to think of it.) Eventually, of course, it got covered with more unsorted paper and then a couple of months ago I sorted that pile (no, it wasn’t the only one in the room but I’m getting to that) and when I got down to the plastic bag I just shuddered and slid its contents straight into the recycling bin.

I didn’t think about my birth certificate.

Or the rental lease and godonlyknows what other important documentation that must have been in there. I only know this now because in the last couple of days I’ve been through all the other paper lying around looking for the damn things, and have had to reconstruct this history by deduction. Now I have to reconstruct legal proof of my existence.

*sigh*

But I found the long-missing instruction manual for my four-track recorder.

I’m pretty pleased about that.