U is for Ugly

As a little girl I always thought of myself as extremely ugly.  Not in a quirky, interesting, goth kind of way, but in an Elephant Man, bag over the head, Cousin It, "If-you-put-on-make-up-people-will-laugh-at-you-for-trying" sort of way.

Looking back, I obviously wasn't terrible at all but I can remember being horribly embarrassed and awkward and uneasy about myself.  And it was always made worse when anyone EVER commented on how I looked. (It took me well into my thirties to learn to accept a compliment gracefully.)

I especially struggled with the facial dissection that occurs in families, when one's features are assigned to various family members of bygone generations.  I apparently have the chin of my aunt, the earlobes of my grandmother, the forehead and hairline of a distant cousin, oh! and Dad announced (with all love) at a dinner with Hec's best friend's family, that I have cow eyes.  COW EYES!  Thanks Dad!  Because I needed that spotlight in front of Colin and his brothers.

The funny thing is that as I have grown older I have developed a great fondness and affection for things less than perfect and although I could easily spend  a week or five without ever looking at my image, I have grown to tolerate the features of my face in a way I never thought I could.  What a relief.  It's so much more relaxing not loathing oneself every time one passes a looking glass.

from Tim Burton's Frankenweenie

My father and I have an ongoing disagreement which is best characterised by my adoration of Tim Burton's aesthetic and Dad's lack of understanding of it.  Dad sees the characters as ugly and deformed, while I perceive them as interesting and exquisite in their imperfection.  I think there is a generational and cultural gap at play in our differing viewpoints.

Whatever it is, I'm glad I can love "ugly" characters because it makes infinitely more things in the world so much easier to appreciate – not the least of which might be me.

T is for Truth

Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters

cannot be trusted in large ones either.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

As our country unfurls its (offshore manufactured) flags and prepares to commemorate the centenary of a myth – no doubt, based in facts – but made popular and so much more palatable by an iconic cinematic masterpiece, Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981), I am struck by an adage: that you'd not want to let the truth get in the way of a good story. 

This dictum has taken our nation quite a way from the core of itself, when the core was actually just fine, had there been the awareness, maturity and the fortitude to seek out the truth rather than just be seduced by a film, throw in some timely nationalistic spin, and call it fact.

And on this very same day the internet is throbbing with outrage because a young woman who built a successful life and business on the back of her astounding recovery from terminal brain cancer, has been exposed as never having had cancer at all.  Misdiagnosis, she suggests. But also, she says, possibly she was confused.  And she definitely had a difficult childhood.  And since she's come out publicly and told the truth about it all, she believes she deserves forgiveness and understanding for the deceit and deception.  She can't seem to see that "the truth" she's told isn't quite credible and nothing really makes any sense in light of what's gone before.  

People are really angry at this woman.  I have read calls for her to be put in jail for life.  I get it.  We don't like being made fools of, and people don't like fraudsters. And lord forbid anyone who really did/does have cancer stopped taking their medication and followed her lead and got more sick.  There's a betrayal here and the public response is vast and visceral.

I was raised to believe that the only thing a person should be loyal to is the truth. I'm interested that as a society we only apply this where it suits us. 

As individuals we can only be responsible for our own stories and our own truth.  It no doubt changes as we grow, reflect, review and gain new insights.  I hope as a community we can grow up and do that too.  I think we will all be so much better for it.

S is for Sky.

I don't often get to take holidays. 

But what I do instead, 

and whenever I like too, 

because it doesn't cost anything,

and because it's absolutely fantastical,

is LOOK UP.

There is probably something healing physiologically when you tilt your torso back and open yourself to the heavens, but to my mind there's definitely something spiritual going on too.

The vast up thereness reminds me of all potentiality.

 It is a prompt to draw a deep breath.

Perspective is realigned.

And my heart can travel freely to the ones I love.

Looking up is my meditation.   

And reminding you to do it is my way of telling you I love you.

R is for Ruin

The greatest puzzle ever: putting the Parthenon back together.

I love ruins.  My favourite place in all the world is atop the Acropolis in Athens, which can be swarming with tourists at the height of summer, yet still somehow allows one to feel a quietude, peacefulness and connection to the planet, like nowhere else – not that I've ever experienced, anyway.

Selfie taken on the Acropolis in Athens in 2005
(before the advent of "selfies").

The late, and wonderful Christopher Hitchens wrote of the place, in 2009

But did you know, for example, that the Parthenon forms, if viewed from the sky, a perfect equilateral triangle with the Temple of Aphaea, on the island of Aegina, and the Temple of Poseidon, at Cape Sounion? Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.

Hitchens espouses the "rightness" of the Parthenon – how it is (or was) “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” and now, in its state of ruin it is no less perfect.  It is.

 
My appreciation of decay extends beyond ancient buildings, to other things as well:  furniture, books, ephemera...  I don't necessarily need to know the story of something, but am warmed just knowing it has lived.  Well, perhaps not lived, but that it has existed in time, experienced the vibrations of the lives around it.  And possibly even absorbed the spirits...

Nothing is more perfect, more comforting and more interesting and engaging, than something less than perfect. 

Perhaps people are the best example.

Q is for Quidditch (& all the sports I don't play)

"Sophia" and "sport" don't find themselves in the same sentence very often.  It really is quite miraculous that I ever got off my bottom to move at all, except that my Mum was cunning enough to leave my books, blocks and teddies far enough out of reach to force me to find a means of getting to them, and hence I learned to crawl, and then walk.

Running wasn't ever something I voluntarily did.  And competitive running? Are you kidding?!  There are photos from a Grade 4 comp but if I wasn't bringing up the rear I'd swear they were faked.

I have horrible memories of the being on the oval in middle school with a dictatorial physical education Nazi teacher forcing me over hurdles.  Hell!  It was hell.  Gazelle-like, my classmates flew over the obstacles, while I hesitated, stumbled and ate dirt and got dirty while the sadistic cow with the blasted whistle shouted.  

I could weep as I type.

Then cross-country running in Year 8 (which involved unsupervised laps of the very large block on which my school was located) left me in tears as the icy air burned my lungs and I lagged behind and I COULDN'T CARE LESS so I often opted instead for a far more civilised session of active sitting and discussion, in a cupboard, in my classroom, with a girlfriend occupying the other side.  Surely the teachers knew of the truancy, but it was probably kinder for everyone that way, so nothing was said, not as far as I knew.

Gladly dancing came into my life at around that time:  go-go.  So without any intention to be fit, or competitive or part of a team I studied as many iconic '60s film clips as I could find on late night television with the intensity many young people devote to the sport of their choice, and learned how to really move.  

 The Sonics - Psycho-a-Go-Go

My father and brother were both state grade sportmen and very competitive.  I love watching sport.  I barrack like my life depends on it, particularly for the Carlton Football Club, a team I was born to support and whose blood runs through the veins of every member of this branch of the family.  But I don't and I never wanted to suffer for sport.  I just don't think it matters.

P is for Pluto

Pluto is a (somewhat controversial dwarf) planet.

Pluto is also a miniature 16 week old schnoodle with a bad '80s dye job and an equally tragic perm who is now running circles round The House at Porter Street.

 
A puppy.  Why a puppy?  Well, there were quite a few reasons, but not the least of which was that we have a 14 year old Maine Coon (cat), Bongo, who has recently lost his life long companion, Poppy.  And I thought it would be easier for him to establish the hierarchy with the newcomer from the outset, if he, the older, wiser party could just...

Well, that all went to hell, didn't it?  What was I thinking?  

Bongo, the BIGGEST scaredy cat in all of Christendom.  

Bongo who in territorial invasions would stand a goodly distance behind Poppy but who generously and consistently lent great support from the rear by way of moral support.

Bongo who was always the first to get to the door, in case matters should spiral out of control.

 Bongo. 

Poor unsuspecting Bongo was one of the reasons we opted for a puppy and not an older dog and now he has to suffer the indignity of getting rushed at by an over enthusiastic ball of shouting fluff  with NO MANNERS when the people aren't paying attention.

The truth is The House at Porter Street has now become an apartheid state. 

Luckily Porter Street house is large.  
Luckily the humans are mainly on their toes.  
Luckily The Dark Lord of the Underworld gets tired early so at least Bongo can still get quality time with his human while it sleeps in its enclosure next to her bed. 

There are upsides and downsides.  The net benefits, of course, have far outweighed the bad bits.  Just not for poor Bongo.  I'm not quite sure how to make it up to him.

Ideas anyone?

O is for Office

The first job I landed after I returned to Australia following my runaway year (1987)  was in the print room of a very conservative Chartered Accountants at the top end of Collins Street.

It was before there were personal computers and a printer next to every work station. It was an open plan office, with rows and rows of hip, ambitious, male (mostly), accountants on one side of the office, private booths (with doors) for the mid-level executives in the middle, and stylish, exclusively female typists on the other side. The senior executives had the offices with windows around the edges. Naturally.

Each accountant would walk their hand-written workings to their assigned typist who would tap away at lightening speed, on an IBM or Hewlett Packard computer, linked by fat network cables to a room filled with banks of giant printers in an airless, windowless room.  

And that's where I lived.

My job was to collate the work as it came off the printers and redistribute it to the accountants.  I also had to make sure the printers didn't jam, which they inevitably did, because they'd overheat in the airless, windowless room: the paper would buckle, the toner would melt and glob and nothing worked as it should (probably least of all me).

It was a stultifying place.  The printers didn't talk to me and I was kept too busy by techno-malfunctioning to make conversation with any of the people who may or may not've been very nice in the world outside the airless and windowless room. 

My most enduring memory of my time at that office was arriving one Monday on crutches, having injured my knee rather badly over the weekend.  I was attempting to deliver the printing to the accountants when one of the amiable  fellows said something funny to me.  And I began to giggle.

With my ability to move limited to the use of crutches I had been carrying the files under my chin, so while I was laughing, I couldn't actually move anywhere, so as it was, I was somewhat stuck.  And the young men, probably all bored out of their brains, found my predicament hilarious.  Which compounded my embarrassment and made me laugh even more .

And at that precise moment my boss walked past.

She approached, gently relieved me of the files I was carrying and eased me towards the foyer, away from the  mirthful sounds so foreign to this usually austere setting.  I tried to apologise for disturbing the peace as we reached the airlock of the lobby, but I was authoritatively shushed and knew not to continue. As we stood facing one another, I waited nervously for this uptight, upright woman to speak.  Perhaps she would ask what had happened to me.  Possibly she would enquire if my leg was ok.  I never, however, expected... 

"Sophia.  We don't laugh here."

Needless to say, I didn't last there. I don't think I was a good fit for them, nor them for me.  I had such a happy departure.  But it should also be noted that my print room office job wasn't the worst job I ever had.  There have been worse.  But that was the first worst.  So it at least gets a crown for that.