Today’s the day I should be applying for jobs. No, it is. This is the day. Really. This is it, as Michael Jackson said. Does that mean I should take an overdose of sleepers? (Something smooth) Oh, kidding, it's a joke. It should, of course, be anaesthetic. (which I don’t understand at all... where is the journey?) Ha ha, no, no. Too soon?
I wrote my journal, as I drank coffee and ate my muesli. Mornings are lovely, they just slip away too quickly
It is a bright, hot sunny day. I can almost feel the heat seeping into the house through every crack in the buildings airtightness. (Is there such a word?)
Oh? Find a job? Fuck it. Is another day really going to matter? (Am I going to regret this?) Of course, the very next moment they are talking about the GFC and the job market shrinking.
Instead, I decided to take myself off to the movies. I wanted to see Iron Lady, at the Nova. 12.10 was the next session. I didn’t look at the movie times for the day until 10.30, when the first session for the day was starting, right at the moment I was looking.
Why does that happen? (Sam would say this is because of the lack of a plan) Is that Murphy's Law? I guess that isn't something going wrong? Well, I guess it is, in a sense.
It was hot walking there. I tried to walk on the side of the road with the shadows, except that it was midday. Ha! It was nice walking under the elm trees in the Carlton Gardens, though. That was a little shady respite from the scorching sun. Just for a minute. I wanted to take my shoes off and walk barefoot in the grass... but I didn't. I should have? What was I scared of? What could there be to be scared of walking barefoot in the grass in a public park? I ask you?
I was surprised by the number of people waiting at the box office, but, apparently, it was $6 Monday. I must have been hanging out at Gold Class Cinemas too often, which is really not like me, and it must be a comment on the company I have been keeping. I’m so much your independent cinema kind of movie goer. But, if the box office boy had said $25 I probably would have paid it. But, $6 was lovely.
I was even more surprised at the queue to the cinema when I got upstairs, as it was already quite long. I said to the group of women standing in front of me, when they commented on the queue in front of us,
“I expect there to be only 3 or 4 people in the cinema when I come.”
“That’s what I expect too,” said the smiley member of the retired women’s appreciation society, in their trousers and hand knitted jumpers. We all laughed. I’ve always had middle aged women charm, they love me. Truthfully, they were just a bunch of “girls” as they would have referred to themselves, who now lunch.
The Iron Lady was sad, as it was predominantly about Alzheimer’s disease. It made me cry in places, as maybe it is too soon for me. It’s a cruel disease, really a sad, unkind disease. And, I guess, it is a subject close to my heart.
So, the Academy Award? As usually, Streep’s acting is fine. She has those almost perfect small mannerisms. That near perfect detail, physical details. The eyes – beautiful blue – the mouth, the inflection, the expression.
But, surely the stars of this movie, deserving of the Academy Award, are the makeup artists.
At varying stages, Streep was an old lady, an old lady played well, of course, but she could have been any old lady. Was that old lady Margaret Thatcher? I don’t know.
At certain other moments, it felt like caricature, and in just a few moments she reminded me of Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford and in a couple of other moments she reminded me of the Little Britain Boys, or Catherine Tate, or was it French and Saunders?
When I came out, it was very hot. I thought immediately about going to interviews in a shirt and tie in that heat and wondered how long I could put off looking for a job? I could hear Anthony’s voice as I crossed the road. “Are you mad?”
I bought some bananas at the Woollies downstairs, to eat on the walk home. As I was coming through the checkout, the man after me was buying large boxes of Nutri-Grain. As my items were scanned, the said man removed the outer boxes from the Nutri Grain packaging flattening them out carefully and precisely, like someone with OCD. He had seriously creepy, deliberate spider-like fingers and dead eyes. He then slid the boxes in behind an ice cream freezer at the front of the supermarket and got on his bike and rode away with the inner plastic bags in supermarket carry bags. He looked like a serial killer? Or maybe that was just me? So familiar with serial killers, as I am.
I thought that the walk to The Nova in Carlton would be enough exercise for the day, but at the last minute, or at least, late in the afternoon, I decided that I should go for a bike ride, because I should try to keep up the momentum of keeping fit, of trying to get back into good shape, trying to speed up my metabolism from, what I believe, is the disastrous effects of my stop start, quit, not quit, habit of smoking and my now re-slowing (is there such a word, it scares me not?) metabolism, now being starved of nicotine.
So, around 5pm I decided to go for a bike ride. It was hot in the afternoon, the sun blazed, the sky (seemingly) burned. The moisture was being fried out of the atmosphere.
When I got home I was hot to the point of burning up; my face was beetroot, my hair slicked with perspiration stuck to my forehead. I’m sure you could have fired eggs on my cheeks. Every part of my body felt the effects of the hot sun, my pulse pumped in my neck. I was still dripping sweat profusely as I stepped into the shower. Oh that cooling water was so gorgeous running over my head and down over my skin. Is it too cliched to say like silk. It is, but fuck it.
Shane cooked sausages and lentils and a green salad with tomatoes and nectarines.
We watched three episodes of the Big Bang Theory, my favourite TV show at the moment, one of them was the new season, after which was the gorgeous Joanna Lumley on Nile.
Anthony called. He said that I shouldn’t even entertain looking for a job at the height of summer, it is just madness. He said it was going to be hot tomorrow and if I dared go out in it I was just asking for trouble. I told him I had to go and pick Mark and Luke up at the airport at 4pm.
“You must take a parasol, then,” he responded. “I have one protecting my tomato plants.” He laughed. He's got that funny matter of a fact way of saying things, which makes me laugh too.
I came back into the lounge room. I knew Shane had heard me mention Mark and Luke’s names, there wasn’t a chance he would have missed that.
“So? What is this? Mark and Luke are coming down?” asked Shane.
“Yes, tomorrow at 4pm.”
“Oh… really… why are they coming?”
“They are going to Vietnam on Wednesday?”
“Oh… I see,” said Shane nervously. “So… um… are they staying some where?”
Are they staying somewhere?
Shane has this really weird denial of Mark and Luke fitting into my life, and there fore, more apparently into his life. He always discounts their existence, rights… oh I don’t know, how do I explain this? It is subtle, really. It is a continual and constant disassociation of them, always in the way he speaks about them. It is as though they are not his friends, members of his inner circle of friends, so he always questions their rights and presence when their orbits coming in contact with his.
It's a little bizarre, the way he reacts to them, so often, as though they are the enemy and I am on his side, totally discounting the fact that they are my best friends.
I’m not at all sure if he realises that they don’t like him because of this stuff. I honestly don't think he does.
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