Eggs in more than one basket

Last year all of my eggs were in four baskets (full time work, full time university, volunteering with Lenny on Sundays, and providing financial assistance and caring for my parents and teenage sisters).

 

This year I want to put my eggs in more than these baskets. I was also worried that I was writing more about my life than living it. I thought I would just do a temperature check with myself.

 

“Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.”

Robin Morgan

Monday 15 January
I went to see another Samuel Beckett play, “Eh Joe” at the NIDA theatre. I didn’t fall asleep this time.

“As Joe, the actor Charles Dance says nothing, but reacts, instead, to a woman’s voice telling him "basically what a shit I am, from beginning to end", he said. If her words do not summon his tears, then "I have to call in other emergency things, of my dog being run over, or something terrible happening to my children. Unfortunately, you kind of plunder one’s emotional library."

“Playing the part of Joe in Samuel Beckett’s play at the Sydney Festival this week, Dance is cast in an unusual role, for him. Joe is alone, shrouded in a dressing gown, abused for his past deeds, or non-deeds. Throughout Eh Joe his face is examined by a camera in the wings and his face projected on a translucent scrim stretched across the entire stage. He sits alone in a dingy room, tormented by a woman’s voice. Unable to defend himself, his agony and emotion plays out in tiny spasms of his face, in flickers of a muscle, the slight movement of an eye, culminating in a solitary tear.”
Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)

I then took my sister for a Lebanese meal in Surrey Hills and then dropped her off at Hyde Park to meet up with some friends who were going out to Oxford Street.

“Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart’s curtain?”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Tuesday 16 January
I went for a walk an hour when I arrived home from work. I came home and had a long bath.

“So many worlds, so much to do,
so little done, such things to be.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Wednesday 17 January

My sister Georgia and I went to the Opera House and saw a one man play called Kiss of Life. The director of the play is also the actor, a guy called Chris Goode.

 

“As a type of theatre, Kiss of Life is hard to define. It has flashes of stand-up comedy, verbatim theatre and prose reading by someone who is definitely not a dreary narrator. This redemptive tale is presented as both a memory and a real-time tale unfolding before us and Goode himself.”

Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)

 

Chris admitted that he is not the most refined actor but I had to admire him for writing and directing that piece and finding a way to perform it on the other side of the earth to a larger audience than he ever had in the UK, accepting that he was far from ‘perfect’.

 

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

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=”EN-AU” style=”COLOR: fuchsia; FONT-FAMILY: "Trebuchet MS"”>Carl Jung

 

 

Thursday 18 January

I was leaving work feeling suddenly lonely. I spontaneously offered to drive Carla, a friend from work home. She is also single and I think a little lonely. We had both lived in the same borough in London, a street apart at the same time. We were a bus away from Edgeware Road, where you could buy raw garlic cloves in oil and chilli from the street markets on cold weekend days. Carla’s parents are Lebanese, so she used to go there to buy ingredients for hummus, tabouli, baba ganoush and vine leaves. Edgeware Road is where one of the London Bombings happened in 2005.

 

Carla and I didn’t meet until I returned home to Sydney. We had a good chat as I drove and when we arrived, she invited me in for a glass of water. I said no and made my excuses. I was feeling a little too vulnerable. She said, “Blue, if you ever want to go out on the weekend, just give me a call”. I told her I had to go. I wanted to buy some blank CDs for my friend Ben. Ben has been asleep on drugs for the past decade and has recently woken up. I have promised to take him on a musical journey to make up for lost time.

 

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

 

 

Friday 19 January

I had my littlest sister Billie stay over and she play Sims 2 while I slept from 8-12pm. As she went to bed at midnight, I woke up and began to write about my brother.

 

I listened to Richard Swift, Thom Yorke, Antony and the Johnstons, Rufus Wainwright, Jose Gonzales, Ed Harcourt, Radiohead, Eva Cassidy, Badly Drawn Boy and Stereophonics as I wrote. I had a good sobbing boo-hoo.

 

When I had finished the sun was rising. I sat at my desk, looked out of my balcony windows and watched the pink sky rise up behind the ANZAC bridge and the city centre.

 

“When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

Madeleine L’Engle”

 

 

Saturday 20 January

I took Billie to the dentist and shopping for clothes and came back to help her clean up her room. Billie had asked to spend the day with me, just one on one, as it is usually her two older sisters who have done that with me. We had such a fun day together.

 

When I came home I rearranged my room and listened to my music, including the Damien Rice CD my Irish friend Caitriona gave to me for my birthday.<o:

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“Take the time to come home to yourself every day.”

Robin Casarjean

 

 

Sunday 21 January

I slept in to 10am. It was hot; the temperature was 42C degrees (108F). Lenny wanted to go to the pool but as I burn too easily I suggested a movie. We went to see Déjà vu to sit in the air conditioning. After that, I went and did some shopping for food. I had nothing in the house to eat. When I came home I worked for most of the night to prepare for my week at work.

 

“Heat, ma’am! It was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.”

Sydney Smith

 

Monday 22 January

I went to the Dendy cinema after work and watched “the Queen”. It wasn’t something I really wanted to see but I was feeling a little bit blue about just going home to do more work. It was an interesting movie. It showed the power equilibrium that Tony Blair established with the Queen when he first came into office, which also coincided with her lack of public response to Diana’s death.

 

“Every man is his own ancestor and every man his own heir.  He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.

H.F. Hedge

 

 

Tuesday 23 January

I went to yoga in the evening. An 8:30pm class of Ashtanga. The teacher is a crazy South African guy, who spends as much time teaching us about the theory of 8 limbs and the meaning of life as he does getting us to do our work. I had done his class for 6 months about 18 months ago and I find him to be very entertaining. He teaches yoga all day and all evening. Ashtanga is a dynamic form of yoga and even in the middle of our winter, everyone in the class leaves the studio hot and sweaty. At about midnight I realised that I had missed a text from Ben saying he was in my suburb.

 

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Henry Moore

 

 

Wednesday 24 January

I had dinner at an Italian restaurant in the rocks with my sister Amber and then we went to see one of the most amazing performances I have seen so far as part of the Sydney Festival. It was called The Space Between, and it was held at the Sydney Opera House. It consisted of three performers dancing and doing acrobatics to the Belgian musician Jacques Brel, JS Bach, Darrin Verhagen, DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin, Fabricate, Murcof and Boards of Canada. The dance

had elements that were very similar to the yoga I do, falling backwards, hand stands, rolls, bends, counter balancing with a partner. The  yummy music combined with the athletic and physically confronting dancing, completely blew our minds.

 

“Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

Thursday 25 January

Tomorrow I am going to see the last show that I have booked into for the festival… I am looking forward to it but sad to think that it will be over soon.

 

“The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.”

Robert Maclyer

 

 

Friday 26 January

On the bright side, this is Australia Day and a public holiday and I am going to spend it all on me, sleeping and writing.

 

“I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”

Brenda Ueland