donnerstag delights me

Thursday. The day Arthur Dent and my mother could never get the hang of. The day when the week starts to get better because you can see the weekend and maybe also the things you've achieved this week.

Donnerstag is Deutsch for Thursday. I know this because Lizzle gave me a diary from Germany, so I'm learning middling German. I like German, and I like the word Deutsch even more. "Like" is such a funny little word, bastardized by the Valley Girls and reclaimed by the crafty indie wannabes like me, who try really hard not to say "like" every three seconds and instead restore it to the original use, which is for similes, metaphors and approval.

......I was supposed to be writing about how I'm going to make an effort to chime in on Gala Darlings "Things I Love Thursday" this year in an effort to be more positive, but I got distracted by a little word. I love doing that.

Other things I love: Running in the rain. Reading Alan Hollinghurst and Miranda July. Listening to albums that I missed when they were being super hyped - namely Lykke Li, Laura Marling and the Arcade Fire. My new Campers shoes. Being organised with my Deutsch Diary and Bitchy Calendar. Training myself to write every day in my 365 book. Finally filing all of last year's university papers - and rereading articles on Dickinson and Gaskell. Watching Stuart: A Life Backwards. Reading Stuart: A Life Backwards. Cooking cupcakes that taste like earl grey tea and eating them with a cup of earl grey tea. Plotting cinema visits in cemeteries. Attempting to go to the moonlight cinema and getting rained on. Meeting boys dressed in haute couture drag and teaching them to walk in heels. Going for long ambles with Lottie, and having conversations with her about highly cultured things. Using the word thing. The bookplate stamp Liz gave me, and stamping people with it. Floating in our pool with Pimms and a book on skinheads. Researching weird and wonderful things to do when I'm in Vienna and Berlin and Bratislava and Dresden. Clean sheets. Leopard prints. Civets, which are a weird cat-like animal. Eating Clinkers on my veranda at one am while thinking about how weird words are. Making lists. Leaving Post-it notes about that say things like "Blog about how you never really understood Eastern European history but love it anyway". Pretending I'm a Cold War Spy. Sleeping in one day, getting up super early the next.

every word, every word

"Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature such as man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny."

- from page 244 of The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (Gallic 2008 English Edition)

I am going to have this printed on to small cards so that when people ask me why I so desperately love literature and so desperately believe in authors who are the opposite of Dan Brown, I can give them a card, smile smugly and return to my book.

I was a bit suspicious of Barbery's book, because I am a snob who would prefer to read something no one else has read so I can be all snobby about it. It's a habit I picked up from an undesirable acquaintance and a habit I'm trying to get rid of. When Amanda recommended The Elegance of the Hedgehog I realised that I had to get over myself. I handed over my $25 (what is the deal with rising book prices, dear government, do you want to encourage boorishness?) and curled up with Lottie (who likes to gnaw everything, including the remote, whatever book I'm reading and her own tail). I was pleasantly surprised. While some of the writing style seems a little heavy, there's such intelligence within that you can forgive that. The autodidact concierge Renee and the anti-bourgeois teenager Paloma are delightful. I wish I'd been as intelligent as Paloma when I was twelve - the way that Barbery has written is mischievously world-weary, if one can be such a thing, without being cynically pretentious. And Renee is the sort of woman that I would like to have tea with. Self taught, secretly smarter than the people she has to work for, she's just delightful. The ebb and flow of the two women's voices is lovely, the way their thoughts intertwine and their lives begin to move closer together.

What I enjoyed most though, was the appreciation of little moments that Barbery and her characters have, whether it's watching owners try to separate their dogs or defending Grammar or watching rose petals, there is a feel that, as Paloma says (on page269) "beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it....Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying." You might find that morbid, but I think in this busy modern world where we worry about our superannuation when we're only 21, we need to find those dying moments, those things that will never happen again. If only so that we don't feel like beasts.


x


Dearest Cricket Australia,
It has been a summer of lots of cricket, hasn't it? And you're not finished yet, not by a long shot! I understand your desire to promote your sport and make as much money as possible, but I have one or two issues to raise with you. Firstly, there is too much cricket happening. We, the viewers, are bored. We are turning off the television, having stomached more than enough of Channel 9's abysmal excuse for a commentary team, we are staying away from the cricket grounds. Might I suggest that whatever you have planned for the 2010-2011 season, you cut in half. Yes, in half. Yes, I know this means the Ashes tour will be shorter, but really, unless the English cricket team can promise that all its players will be fit, in a competitive mood, then watching Australia beat the Poms 5 test matches in a row is going to be very very dull. Even if they do win back that little pot of ashes. So shall we say 3 tests instead of 5, half the number of one-day matches, and for goodness sake, don't schedule any Twenty20s. They are boring, bogan cricket and make Bill Lawry wet his pants. There is barely any tension in Test cricket, let alone one-dayers and Twenty20. Tension is the whole point of cricket. It is a gentleman's game, it's supposed to be full of barely restrained fury, twirly mustaches and cries of "jolly good show!". Not Bill Lawry's nasal cries of whatever it is he goes on about. While we're at it, new commentary team please. Perhaps with a woman or two involved - I'm sure I'd be fabulous at it.
My next issue with you, dear Cricket Australia, is your ticket prices. My brother and I were all set to help your declining audience numbers tomorrow at the one day match between the West Indies and Australia. At $50 for a Bronze ticket, which would put us two lily livered pasty pants out in the scorching sun for the majority of the match, I have to regretfully tell you to get stuffed, and lower your ticket prices. It's not worth it - not when the result of the match is practically a foregone conclusion. Which brings me to my final point - Until there is a team willing to get their act together and offer the Australians some decent competition, the Australian team must play not with 11 members, but 10. They must also bat with their less dominant hand and during batting power plays, at least 6 of the fielders must have a hand tied behind their backs. I say this not as someone proud of her national team, but as someone very very very very bored with Australia winning all the time. It's boring. And they are so ungracious about that. Someone get Jerome K. Jerome back from the dead, I'm sure he could teach them how a gentleman should play cricket.
So, dearest Cricket Australia, don't let me down. I (and probably all the other viewers who have turned off the teev) am counting on you.
Sincerely,
Madeleine
P.S. If you could get Channel 9 to stop going to the news at 6 o'clock if the team that isn't Australia is batting, that'd be great. I wrote them a rude letter about the colonial racist undertones and double standards, but they haven't replied. Pip-pip!

they tell me my cupcakes are nice

Yesterday I made a cake that exploded and covered the oven in ginger goo.
Today I made a bowl of muesli explode and cover the inside of the microwave in goo and nuts.
I think tomorrow I'll have toast.

x

It is February, the time of the great wet torrential rain in Sydney.
Normally people rejoice about this.
My grandma is grousing because she can't do the washing.
Lottie seems to like mud.

double-dog-dare

It has been too hot to blog. Also, my inexplicable dislike of the word "blog" sometimes turns me off. Someone fix this please, and while you're at it, do something about the words "lubricant" and "moist". Those words make my skin crawl.

(I'm watching my sister organise my books into alphabetical order. It's kind of bizarre, and vaguely slave-labour-esque. Still, she was the one who wanted to do it. I now have two bookcases, one for fiction and one for non-fiction. I was pleasantly surprised by how much non-fiction I own, although most of it is travel and music related. Or educational. At any rate, this is the most organised my books (and I) have ever been. Claudia predicts it will last a month before I knock something over.)

As it's February now, and my summer is slipping away, university looming closer like a big scary thing, I feel I should try and get back into blogging. As much as the word disgusts me. So I apologise in advance, but I've challenged myself to write a twenty five word minimum entry per day for the entirety of this month. I'm an over-talker by nature, so this should be easy. I'm apologising in case its boring. I think the problem with my blogging is that I've never been sure exactly what to write about - and when I do find something, it never comes out right.

Someone very drunk once told me that you can't ever be right, you just have to be consistent. Which makes absolutely no sense, but you know, drunk people don't have to make sense. I think perhaps what he meant is that you just have to be doing something, and that sometimes repetition is kind of helpful.

The same person also asked me to try to be more cultured.
So I've made some Bircher museli, and am waiting for the culture to set in.

No, no, seriously, some real culture for you: I'm reading A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot, which is the novel the movie was based on. As is often the case with these things, the book is almost completely unrecognisable to the movie. The main characters, Mathilde and Manech are dealt a much harder hand than they are in the movie. You get a sense though of how World War One left no one untouched, from the stories Mathilde collects as she tries to find Manech. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm hoping the ending is similar (or better) than the movie.

I dragged Claudia to see The Princess and the Frog on Friday. Best Disney movie in years. Really. Better than Mulan and Aladdin, on par with Beauty and the Beast. There's a fully formed world, with awesome jazz and blues music, jokes on every level for everyone, a decent story line and characters who do more than wait around for fate to be nice to them. The Alligator, Louis, is awesome. And the food! I think I've talked about how much I love Southern USA food. I was drooling, and this is a cartoon. I have to convince my family we need a deep fryer so I can make beignets. Go and see it. I'll come, and bring pecan pie.


Um, all that was way more than 25 words.

the great bathers quest

The last pair of bathers I owned were gleefully tossed into a dumpster in Reykjavik at 4 am one rainy September morning. I remember this because I was so sick of these bathers, I'd had them for 4 years. I then avoided buying a new pair until last Sunday. I'm not big on swimming, mostly in some sort of Freudian reaction to my mother, who adores swimming. She petitioned, campaigned, downright whined for about 7 years until we relented and said, yes, OK, you can have a pool. Stop pouting. When summer hits, my mother goes out and buys herself new swimsuits. Gleefully. I have never met a woman who loves swimwear shopping as much as my mum. She's a wonder.

Part of the reason I think most women (women that I know, anyway) hate swimwear shopping is because its just so revealing - and that's just in the change room. When I went bathers shopping on Sunday (the hottest day EVER. UGH), I tried on TWELVE pairs of swimmers. I had to remind myself that they're supposed to be tight.

I didn't go near any of the bikinis. They're dangerous. For several reasons

1. There's just not enough fabric to protect me from skin cancer. I am PALE. I am Snow Maddie. I am not about to put my skin in danger. In fact, if I go swimming during the hottest period of the day (11am-3pm) then I am in rash shirt and boardies and 9L of 30+ sunscreen. Having grown up with a cancer specialist for a father, I cannot impress upon people how dangerous over exposure is in the sun. I am the girl who got sunburned in the Cotswold's DURING A FIVE MINUTE BREAK IN A THUNDERSTORM.
   
2. There's just not enough fabric to protect me from over exposing myself. Look, I get that the human body is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately, I (like alot of other lovely ladies) have very poor self esteem, as I am not all that thin. I don't have limbs you can snap. Also, I am very flaily with my limbs - expressive is a nicer word, I guess. Put me in something that is held together with two knots and is roughly the size of a tea saucer and we might run into some problems. You might see more than you wanted. And then I would run away and never come back.
3. They're boring. Like, really. All the patterns are boring. This season.
4. Why should I pay the same price for a bikini as I do a one piece???? That's just stupid

So with all that in mind, I decided on a one piece - yes, I know, you can get tankinis, but I don't like the word tank. Or that my tummy tends to escape. I trekked into DJ's and moseyed around the swimwear section. And found 12 one pieces to try on. Out of the twelve I tried

ONE of them had a neckline that perhaps should have been called A BELLYBUTTON LINE.
ONE of them I couldn't work out how to get into for a good 10 minutes.
ONE of them had a very unflattering red flower that emerged from ones rear.
TWO of them had weird cutout bits that I hadn't noticed when they were on the hanger
THREE of them had this sort of skirt thing that in theory was great, but in reality made me look five (the pink one) or eighty (the blue and navy ones)
FOUR of them were too high cut in the thigh.

I was beginning to think that I would just go and make myself a pair of swimmers that looked like this
from here

And then I tried on the last one piece I had found. To be honest, when I saw these on the rack, I'd sort of decided that they'd be the ones. Cut nicely on the thigh, with a little retro look to them. They looked swish, as long as I didn't look at my pasty thighs or belly. They weren't in danger of falling off. They would do, if only to ensure that I could go into the pool in the 40 degree heat that was Sunday.

from here

Obviously I look nothing like the girl in the picture. Which is the problem with swimsuits, and most fashion. They only cater for the beautiful. The rest of us have to work hard, the rest of us try stupid diets, or worry that perhaps they can't go out in public. It's sad. I mean, good on the beautiful women that meet the grade, but speaking as someone who rarely meets the grade when it comes to clothing size (because I am petite, but I am chubby! Who knew!) it can be very demoralising. The lights in change rooms don't help, nor all the mirrors. What does help is that all my friends are lovely, and when we were splashing about in the pool, trying to recover from the disgusting 40degree heat, they told me my bathers were nice. And then splashed me.


x


It was disgusting yesterday. So I of course, made a sort of invented pecan pie. Which was awesome. Sometimes my desire to vist the Americas is purely food based. Except for Tex-Mex. Ew.

one time around the ballroom slow

"sometimes things happen, and they're really scary." my usual eloquent, articulate nature is muted. from shock and gin, probably. a cool change has surged through, smelling of salt and relief. respite.

today Spike couldn't stand up, couldn't stand up and wouldn't respond. he's old, and deaf, i know i know i know, but he's never looked right through me and whimpered. i thought i'd be as sick as him, vomit all over our courtyard like he did. i let him lie on top of me while i called my grandparents and couldn't tell who was shaking more - me or him.

so we took him to the hospital, muzzled because he didn't seem to recognise us, seemed like all his muscles hurt. we carried him to the car on a towel, a neardeadwieght that had me nervyedgyscared, and my grandparents tensetersetightlipped. barely a wag of the tail from a dog who normally goes into overdrive when the chance to get in a car presents itself. and when we got to the vet's, he had to be carried in a stretcher, whimpering.

Dr Leah tells me it's probably heatstroke. my grandparent's tell me it's probably heatstroke. they all say he's going to be fine. they arrange to keep him in overnight, and i fork over $200 so that they can do blood tests to make sure he's ok. i want to ask if i can see him, but i'm aware that i'm twenty, not twelve, that i should be behaving more responsibly. so instead i go home and pick an arguement with my other grandmother about how if she'd let me keep him inside like i wanted to, he wouldn't be spending the night with strangers.

and i speak to Jason, who worries about my eloquence and articulation until we squabble about stress displacement. my family comes home from new zealand and in ten days i have forgotten how noisy they are. we eat pizza with blue cheese on it. despite six people hollering over it, the house seems like it's missing something. someone.

someone big and hairy and smelly.



x

this is very wentz-esque, i realise. tough shit, i'm upset. you try dealing with your dog being sick and see how you like it.


x

i just finished Schlink's "The Reader", which was quietly breathtaking. it's technically a holocaust novel, but i think it's more of a study of guilt and denial. i can't wait to see the movie version with Kate Winslet. also read Orwell's "Down and Out In London & Paris" which is so starkly lyrical and raw that it made it on to my top twenty books i've ever read. next up, that peter cameron and grace paley, please.

most of my friends smell weird

when it gets too hot to sit outside, watching the pool turn green, we move inside to watch the cricket together, both irritated by tony greig, lulled to sleep by richie benaud. a wicket causes us to jolt upright, you indignantly so. movement causes a cloud of dust from your ears, bath time imminent (despite the last one being on friday morning). the loyalty in your mutter i wonder how i got so lucky, with your nose against my knee and magnetic fields on the stereo, cold beer in the fridge. makes the knowledge that tomorrow i have to get up at 6am to go to the gym a little easier.
this is spike, my airedale terrier. he's become oddly affectionate over the last few days, which is problematic because he smells bad. headbutting and catlike rubbing are his choice methods of displaying affection - he's not a licky dog. sometimes he does bizarre things, like get plastic pot plants stuck on his nose. when he was a puppy, he ate a plastic wagon over three months. he's scared of new years eve and doesn't like our kitchen floor because he slides on it. his eyebrows are really long. and he's currently lying on the grass outside my window barking at neutrinos, which he finds inherently annoying.

(also, it looks like i have a bald spot. this is my red hair growing back, i swear.)
(also, i never really realised how big he is - even though im sitting down and he's the runt, he's still a big 'un)

x


today i found a dead bird in the skimmer box of our pool. libby, who was in the pool at the time, went green, shouted something about murder and bolted. later my neighbour maria, asked me if everything was ok. maria lives across the street from us. libby is loud.

and mean. she's making me go to the gym tomorrow morning.

x

im running out of things to read - there's an e.e. cummings bio that looks interesting, but does anyone have any other ideas?