Katie Came Home

Well, no, that’s what I do every day anyway, so there’s nothing too exciting about that. What I really mean is, I lost the impetus to write anything at all quite abruptly earlier this year, but it came back, equally abruptly, when I listened closely yesterday to Shawn Colvin’s Sunny Came Home (which, incidentally, has been among Katie’s Top 100 for several years). Now, I had just finished re-reading Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (which has caused me to start re-incorporating words like ‘schism’ and ‘flaneur’ [HELLO VRIC!!!] into my vocabulary), so it came quite naturally that I listened to Sunny with Lemony Snicket in mind.

Has anyone else read the series and found the song to almost be like an eerie sequel?

No? OK, look.

(I’m afraid you’ll have to have read the books in order to get what I’m going to say)

Sunny came home to her favourite room

Sunny sat down in the kitchen

In the books, Sunny Baudelaire’s favourite room would have been the kitchen. She was the chef among the siblings, even as a baby, and in The Beatrice Letters, was said to have discussed her recipes on the radio.

She opened a book…

Books featured very prominently in ASOUE, and the greatest reader in it was her brother, Klaus.

… and a box of tools…

Shades of her sister Violet, the inventor. Symbols of both her siblings in the same sentence and in their marked absence. What happened to them?

Sunny came home with a mission

Very VFD.

Days go by, I’m hypnotized…

That happened to Klaus at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill.

It’s time for a few small repairs…

Like Violet would have taken care of.

Strike a match, go on and do it…

I close my eyes and fly out of my mind into the fire…

THE most ASOUE-esque symbol of all: fire, which destroyed all the important buildings in the series – the Baudelaire and Quagmire mansions, the VFD headquarters, Caligari Carnival and Hotel Denouement.

Doesn’t the song sound just like a sinister follow-up in which Sunny loses her beloved siblings, turns to the dark side and becomes a fire-setter instead of a volunteer? After all, in The Beatrice Letters, the three kids have grown up and mysteriously disappeared, with no confirmation of whether they are dead or alive.

Right. Back to reality. The fact is, Sunny Came Home PRECEDED ASOUE by a good three years, so there is no way that it was intended to be related to the series, and all the connections therefore really only exist in my own mind <ducks rotten vegetables being thrown>.

But try doing what I did – read the books and then listen to the song, and perhaps you may come to agree that “miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear”.

I think God will explain

I started getting sick last night with a runny nose that wouldn’t let up. Barely got any sleep, but got through fistfuls of tissue paper. So this morning, after covering Orange’s ward, I took sick leave, and that’s why I’m writing this at home now. Still getting through fistfuls of tissue, with eyes wide-open as saucers, despite two and a half Fedacs, five or six Piritons (lost count), one Zyrtec and two hot toddies with generous shots of Jameson Irish Whiskey, all consumed within the past nine hours.

‘Tis madness in the world too. One (if blatantly non-Caucasian) fears to travel to Melbourne now, lest one (regardless of official comments) gets torched. Or to Hongkong, where the term ‘acid rain’ has taken on new meaning. Or to Malaysia, where the communion wine is rapidly being replaced by Molotov cocktails.

I’ve come to think that, in the small scheme of things, this craziness can’t really be explained (for example, where I caught this buggery cold from). But, in the big scheme of things, there must be a pattern of some sort. It’s something like Ice Age 2 (which I admit to watching last night), where the ice cracks and thaws for reasons that the critters never get to comprehend. Unlike us, they didn’t have greenhouse emissions and fossil fuels to blame. Now, being a step (or several thousand) ahead of them, we could possibly say that the Ice Age ended so that we’d exist, and that would be a great reason. But why should the pattern end there? In the big scheme of things, there will probably be plenty more ends and starts that will happen, and only if we are there at the very finish, with one who will make it all clear, will we see that there was indeed a reason for everything.

In the small scheme of things, though, right here and right now, there’s nothing on my mind more than this sodding cold. Damn these bloody germs.

Ode to ’09

It’s the last few minutes.

Goodbye, year. We’ve had our ups and downs. As always.

You’re special in many ways, but I’m afraid I won’t always remember them.

That’s part of growing. Up. Older. Old.

Moving forward. On. Away.

For the record, though, you’re when I started writing again. Figured out what to do with my work. Bought bags. Cut my hair short.

That’s enough to remind me of the other good things. Of which there were a lot.

So thank you.

Rest in peace. I think you will.

Melbourne, Melbourne

I am writing this post from my office while on call on a rainy Saturday afternoon and the first day of a long weekend. Cheers for the weekend, but certainly not for the call. In all my years of working, I have yet to meet a fellow colleague who doesn’t hate calls. Corona used to look forward to them (why, I’ll never know), but has now gained wisdom. Although, yes, it is not too bad being here amid the bubbling and dribbling fishtanks, I can still think of a thousand better ways to spend a Saturday than confronting a six-foot knife-wielding chappie with friendship bands woven in his cloud of hair, six anklets and a bracelet of dreadlocks (possibly his own, but who can say for sure?).

In moments like these, I tell myself, “Melbourne, Melbourne”, like a wonky mantra. This works because I AM GOING THERE NEXT WEEK <a thousand exclamation marks>. I cannot wait to get out of the Fruit Farm for a while. The airfare and accommodation have all been settled and confirmed, and I am planning the itinerary to include the Great Ocean Road (Mr. Manx: yay!), horse-riding (Mr. Manx: eh), hot-air ballooning (Mr. Manx: buh), and most definitely shopping (Mr. Manx: meh). Sites like Total Travel and Tripadvisor have been an enormous help, as have the three guidebooks that I plowed through. And I am writing it all down in a self-created timetable, in different-coloured inks. Yes, my friends have called me obsessional.

The one thing I have not done is pack. Heh. I had a dream, some nights ago, that I woke up two hours away from my flight and STILL had not packed. Result: pure pandemonium.

Speaking of packing, last night I chanced upon this brilliant site, One Bag, about learning how to pack lightly. ‘Packing lightly’ is just two words, but there’s apparently a whole science to it that I’d never even thought about. For example, the author recommends never folding clothes, but ‘bundle wrapping’ (laying them flat and wrapping them sequentially around some pillowy object) them instead, as a better way to eliminate creases and wrinkles. Who would’ve even thought of that in the first place?

And speaking of bags, I so want to check out a couple of secondhand (dubbed ‘preloved’ by connoiseurs) bag shops in Melbourne as well. There are two reputable ones – Mio Tesoro and Secondo, that I hope to find some good stuff at. I am eyeing:

All that’s going to cost a pretty penny, so I suppose that’s a good reason to be thankful – as far I’m capable of being – for calls.

One and a half more calls to Melbourne… Melbourne…