If I Ever Feel Better

After 12 months, 7 or 8 rehearsals and 2 drummers, I think Nikki and my band might finally be going somewhere.  Not anywhere fast, mind, but somewhere.  Last weekend, we had a practice at our place where we nailed our first song (including art rock outro with melodica), got somewhere with our second song and even started on a few others.  We also have a stable 5-member line up.  As in the line up is stable - not necessarily the members themselves.

Our songwriting philosophy at the moment seems to be “write the title first and the song will come”.  This may not be a tried and tested method, but we don’t really have another.

We also have a tentative name - The Telephone Book Inspectors.  Music bloggers everywhere - pay attention.  You will certainly be the first person in the world to be in to us if you get in now.

I didn’t grow up in a “dog” household, or really an animal household of any kind.  My parents bought us cats when we were very young.  The first didn’t accompany us when we moved to Queensland in ‘85 and the last one met a tragic end in ‘89, as did a few pet birds — and that was the end of our pet ownership.

Nikki, on the other hand, grew up with a beautiful Wheaten Terrier who still lives in Canada with her family.  So from time to time we’ve talked about getting a dog.  I’ve been very practical about it for a long time and insisted that the time when we can look after a dog properly will come, but it’s not yet.  Things started to break down when my sister and family bought a bouncy ball of white fluff called Sophie the Spoodle.  She’s won over everyone and made me start to think that maybe I could be a “dog person”.

More recently, we made the mistake of spending a solid hour in a pet store cuddling a Cavoodle that Nikki named “Teddy Ruxpin” because of his resemblance to the creepy animatronic toy.  He broke us both and we nearly paid up and took him home right then and there.  But sense prevailed and we decided to do things properly: get permission from our landlord, equip the house, find a breeder and make sure we got a dog from a good home.

Our real estate agent said that she just needed to check with strata for our building, but had said before that we probably could have a pet.  We managed to find a breeder a few hours out of Sydney who put us down for the little guy in the picture — officially named Teddy Ruxpin II by us.  And then a few days before we were scheduled to meet Teddy, we got the news that our building doesn’t allow pets.  No reason — the owners of the other flats just like it that way.

A few people have told us to damn the man and get a dog anyway.  It’s a bit hard when we have strata committee members on every side of us — and neither of us is keen to have a dog that has to be hidden away at all times.

There will be other places and other chances to get a dog.  But sadly, both Teddy Ruxpins will now be with their new owners and I wish them well.  I hope they are very happy.

When older people make sweeping generalisations about “Gen-Ys with their Twitters and their Facebooks”, I usually think they’re…well, generalising.  I was born in the 80s (at the early end) and I’m pretty comfortable with technology, but I’m not ADHD about it, nor do I feel the need to post daily pictures of my lunch with annotations of “OMG LOL”.  Nor do I think this is how most of my generation are.  But my goodness, today made me wonder.

Nikki wanted to go and check out the Finders Keepers markets in Eveleigh, so we jumped off the train in Redfern and decided to “follow the hipsters” rather than be too particular about directions.  It was a pretty safe strategy.  The group of late-teen girls we ended up tagging behind were animatedly discussing a friend’s relationship where - and I am not kidding - all the action related to changes of Facebook status.

“So she suddenly went from ‘in a relationship’ to ’single’ and I was like ‘What?’ and I dunno…like, maybe I should ask her or something?”

Like they say these days, if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.

At the markets, it was a pretty mixed group: hipsters, yipsters, parents with well-dress toddlers, schoolkids - a good cross section of White People.  It was cool enough, although even Nikki had to admit that after seeing 15 stalls with design grads theming their work around owls and birds and deer head, it gets a bit old.

While we were there, the live entertainment consisted of a girl who couldn’t have been more than 18 strumming her guitar and singing folky numbers.  The incongruous thing was that half of her set consisted of angsty early-90s covers (The Cranberries, 4 Non-Blondes etc) and the remainder was her own compositions including songs about - here we go again - Facebook.  Arguing with friends and stalking boys online.  Write about what you know, I guess.  But more than anything, I just want to know how someone born in the 90s even discovers 4 Non Blondes.

What I’m trying to say is this: people born before 1975, I apologise.  You were right.  I’m sure people my age have spent the last few decades looking just as absurd to you as these guys do.  I just have one last question: how did you not end up slapping us?

My introduction to post-honeymoon married life was a little bit bumpy.  A stressful time at work, a pulled muscle and a bad head cold all left me a touch grouchy and irritable.  Luckily none of that outweighed the sheer joy I get out of coming home to find Nikki here, rather than thousands of miles away.

I always pictured marriage as being a synonym for “maturity”.  Married people had responsibilities and commitments and children and didn’t goof around.  My dozen or so young married friends have taught me otherwise, but I still saw them as being a little more serious.  Getting engaged to Nikki, I knew that there was no way a marriage certificate was going to make us anything close to “grown-up”.

I get reminded of this when I come home to find that Nikki has bought a decorative metal tree to hang all her earrings (and a metal elephant for her rings) and has spent the afternoon dancing to Passion Pit in a style I can’t possibly describe.  I’ll post a video one day, I promise. Anyway, it delights me and makes me do a little dance myself.

I’ve spent too much of the last ten years wanting to be old and now I’m savouring the feeling of being impossibly young.

It was 38 degrees (that’s 100 in American) and we nearly died in the attempt, but on July 4, Nikki and I tied the knot.  It was a quick ceremony - 11 minutes according to someone with a stopwatch and a sporting bent - but beautiful.

And now we’re married people, with whatever that entails.  So far, it’s mostly entailed being the laziest two humans in the world, eating delicious things and snorkeling with tropical fish.  Normal life resumes tomorrow, but with Nikki now properly around, it won’t be boring.

After my first day in my new job, I blurted out to Nikki, “I’ve got an office, a Blackberry and a personal assistant! Who am I?”

To be true, the PA isn’t strictly mine - I share with two others - but I do have someone is supposed to manage my diary, do my photocopying and make phone calls for me. At least, I think that’s what she’s supposed to do. I haven’t quite got this figured out.

I did a bit of a survey of people I know to see what they thought.

My dad, who has had assistants for years now, said that you can get them to do anything. Organise your personal travel, get cards for birthdays, arrange your dry-cleaning. Basically, whatever work is making you too busy to do. My friends, most of whom don’t have PAs, generally agreed. “I’d love to have someone to do everything for me,” was the typical response. Although one mate said that he’d had an assistant for a few months and was as clueless as me.

I just feel really uncomfortable asking someone the same age as my mother to do things I am able to do myself. But on the other hand, this dry cleaning won’t take itself to the shops.

Moving to the North Shore has its definite positives.  I can afford a place bigger than a shoebox.  I don’t find empty syringes or condom wrappers on my doorstep in the morning.  I can walk up the street to get coffee without smelling urine once.  It’s just so frigging…nice.  There are trees and people have washed and my neighbours are nice and I am realising that I have always been a bourgeois yuppy on the inside.

There are dangers too.  Naturally, the overwhelming upper-middle-classness of it all could mean that I forget that there are poor people out there.  I could start to believe that absolutely everyone drives a BMW or a Lexus and that a Honda Jazz really is no car at all.  I could start talking about my stock portfolio.  I could have a stock portfolio.  The possibilities are endless.

Another risk that Nikki and I observed when scoping out the area is that, like a number of other harbourside neighbourhoods, this suburb has recently experienced a “baby boom”.  It seems as if everyone around here is aged between 25 and 40 and pushing a pram.  It’s clearly the place you go when you want to buy a unit, do some renovations and have yourself a kid or two.

“Everyone’s nesting,” said my fiancée on seeing the young families dotting the park we were in.

“The worst thing is that they make it look kind of appealling!” I commented, guiltily.

“I didn’t want to come out and say it, but yeah…”

If you intend to stay young and footloose, you can’t be too careful where you live.

Today I was about to do another post about atheism when I realised that it was probably time for a change of approach.  It dawned on me, as it does very occasionally, that there are people out there who don’t have regular updates on my life and are actually interested in what’s happening.  Since I don’t use Twitter, rarely update Facebook (although I lurk pretty often) and don’t have time to verbally update everyone in my life, I guess this little blog is a good a place to spread the word.

So 2009 is quite the year.  Just over a month ago, I started another job - possibly the most challenging yet and a strangely exhilirating one.  This weekend, I move across town to a new and unfamiliar neighbourhood.  In a matter of weeks, I’ll turn 28 and get married to the most beautiful, funny, ridiculous girl I’ve ever known.  Out of that list, only turning 28 doesn’t feature in the rankings of “biggest causes of stress” - and yet I feel strangely calm.

Perhaps it’s watching all my fears at the beginning of the year turn out to be baseless that has given me a new assurance.  There were a lot of fears and absolutely every single one failed to materialise.  There’s a lesson in there about always assuming the worst, but it’s one that I’m learning only slowly.

Everyone I know says that they keep expecting their life to simplify and it never does.  I think I now know that too - and that the secret is in learning to enjoy yourself and find fulfilment in the spaces between the busyness.  They’re not always easy to find, but they are there.  A piece of unremarkable wisdom, sure, but one I’ve seen others realise far later in life.

It’s nice to be wanted, for sure.  When you’re starting out in a career and questioning whether you make the grade, there’s little more flattering than being approached with job offers.  I think for a long time, I had enough doubts about my employability to think that you should never turn down an offer - at least not without another in hand.

Recently, I’ve reached a new conclusion - not an epiphany exactly, but a new clarity.  I actually have power over where my career takes me.  I don’t have to follow the random trail of opportunity, leaping ahead without any thought as to what’s the best.  I’m not a fortune teller and it’s hard to predict how a job will turn out.  But if I have misgivings or serious doubts?  I don’t have to ignore them.

Being a lobbyist is not an entirely evil career choice, despite what some will tell you, but it’s not a morally neutral one either.  There are good things to lobby for and bad things to lobby for.  There are neutral things to lobby for, but even they can lead to trade-offs and negative outcomes.  And the person who is paying your salary will have a lot of control over what you end up advocating.  The thing is, I can choose who that is.

My ego has been stroked this year by a number of job offers and inquiries.  Some have been easy to turn down, others much more attractive.  All would involve some compromises and consequences.  The process has been helpful, because it’s shown me what I want and what I don’t want.

So no matter how flattered I may feel, it’s time to start drawing some lines in the sand.  And maybe I’ll get to use my powers for goodness and niceness.

There’s a bit in one of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books where a guy gives up on humanity when he sees instructions on a packet of toothpicks.  I knew exactly how he felt when I read the packet of my dental floss, which proclaims:

50m
2x as Much Floss*

*Than 25m packs

Thank you, Johnson & Johnson copywriters! Where would I have been without your handy calculation skills?