Rumbled!

Dear Reader, the time has come to flee; my refuge has been discovered. The angry cries of the villagers grow louder and I can hear their slavering hounds baying for blood. In the midst of my hurried packing I glance out the window and see the ever-closer horde brandishing pitchforks and flaming torches.

In other words not torn from the script of a 1950s B-grade Dracula movie, I’m leaving forever. I know you’ve had ample time to get used to the idea of never reading another blog post from me ever again, and there are probably some of you who are surprised I’m still around at all, so I trust no one will be bereft at (or even aware of) my departure. While I always liked the idea of keeping my little blog around just in case I could ever be arsed to write anything again, there’s a certain loss of joie de bloggeur when an anonymous blog is no longer, well, anonymous.

This, then, is the end of Lonie Polony and her blog. Thank you to everyone who read and commented on it – I really do appreciate each and every kind word I ever received, and I guess even the unkind ones.

And in the end, the love I took was equal to the love I mook…or something.

Hidden in Jest

Sometimes I half believe and almost wish that, were my skull to be opened up for some yet-to-be-determined reason, the doctors would find a fist-sized tumour in my brain. Not because I want to face a physically and emotionally agonising death, but because the discovery of something that shouldn’t be there, something that’s crowding my memory centre and interfering with the efficient rapid-firing of my neurons, would explain everything. Suddenly my embarrassing stupidity, my frustrating slowness of wit and my worryingly poor memory would all make sense. In a few short hours, the easily operable and completely benign tumour would be removed, and my former mental acuity would return. Perhaps I would also become beautiful and slim. Why not?

The sobering reality is that, as a non-super working mother with many demands on my paltry resources of time, energy and long-term memory, I may never regain the sprightliness of cognition which abandoned me around my third pregnancy like some deadbeat dad. Even more mortifying is the possibility that my brain power hasn’t changed at all; that I’ve merely sloughed the scales of callow, arrogant youth from my eyes and finally recognised my own stark inadequacies. Whatever the explanation, I watch in wistful envy as grads I saw enter the building barely out of nappies now outstrip me in a job that’s evolved past my abilities. Confronted with the esoteric challenges of the work, I see their minds leaping ever onward like mountain goats on the Matterhorn, whilst mine struggles feebly like an axolotl in the mud.

During my interview with the Department of Hippies, they laughed incredulously when I told them how long I’d been in my current job. They told me changing teams every couple of months was de rigueur in their department. If they’d asked me then, I would’ve said I stuck around for reasons that added up to me loving the work, and meant it. Obviously I loathe the peripherals – certain unpleasant people, the waist-high drifts of red tape through which I must constantly wade – or I wouldn’t be searching for jobs elsewhere. But I’d always felt I was doing something challenging, rewarding and important. In the last few days, though, reading through boring and meaningless documents on which I’ll eventually have to write boring and meaningless reports, the cogs of my slow and unwieldy brain finally ground into place, and I realised I hate my job.

I know I sound wickedly ungrateful for my health and employment. I know I should be doing the equivalent of pounding the pavement looking for jobs, CV in hand and hopeful determination on my face like a plucky character in a tacky ’80s movie about making it on Wall Street. Right now I don’t feel fit for much more than wallowing in apathy-inducing depression. It’s not all bad, though. I bypassed a nervous breakdown a few weeks back, perhaps I’ll revisit it and try it on for size. I may not be eligible for cure-all brain surgery, but mental health leave’s as good as a holiday.

Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!

I’m not in the habit of inhaling the miasma of public toilets, but I can’t help noticing the ladies’ loos on my floor at work smell uncannily like toffee. I don’t know whether the unsavoury proximity to the kitchenette or some freakish accident of rodent decomposition is responsible, but it’s a smell I find somewhat unsettling. (Side note: my sister was changing my infant niece’s nappy when an unfortunate bout of projectile poohing struck. Arcing gracefully through the air like a ballerina executing a grand jeté, the erstwhile breast milk landed with a sizzle on the wood-fired heater. The aroma of cooking excrement, so my sister said, was a disturbingly pleasant caramel.)

It was for somewhat more than this trivial reason, however, that I applied for a new job some months ago. Feeling that circumstances were such that only a change of department would do, I limbered up my fingers for some fancy typework and bashed out an application to the Department of Hippies. Now, my diehard followers (cue the chirping of crickets in my abandoned corner of cyberspace) will know that I somehow fooled all the flowerchildren and passed unchecked through the Gates of Recruitment with the correct arcane buzzwords on my lips and suitably convincing referrals in my hands. My new job was a mere length of red tape away.

And so I was left to dither in an agony of indecision; I felt tied to the Department of Meat Products by a fear of change and the pleas of a harried boss who’d already lost too many experienced staff, but impelled towards the Department of Hippies by a new supervisor I rather suspect may be a high-functioning sociopath. For months, while the bureaucratic wheel – square, of course, and oft diverted for no explicable reason – made its slow revolution, I demanded career advice from family and friends, with varying and often unsatisfactory results. My resolve swung like a metronome counting out the beats of a funeral march, for either a significant personal era or my chance of escape would soon be dead and gone. But at last, I made a decision I was happy with: I would join the chanting, daisy-crowned ranks and kick my unpleasant supervisor goodbye.

And then the wheel turned with a final jolt to crush my foolish hopes. The faithless hippies had led me on with sweet-talk and smiles, only to reveal they liked someone else better.

So for now, as much as I dread work each day, nothing remains for me but to suck it up and handle my disappointment philosophically. After all, toffee-scented shit happens.

Just popped in to say hello…

Yoohoo! Anyone home?

I idly clicked on my blog link today after months of purposely avoiding it, and was surprised to see how much time had elapsed since I last delighted the world with my fulsome inanities. Has it really been five months?

I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed laying blogging aside to take up other things, although I’m not sure that all-day mega marathons of America’s Next Top Model provide the same stimulation and creative outlet that even my humble efforts at blogging do. Forgive what sounds like lame self-help psychobabble, but it’s been somewhat of a months-long exhalation of relief not to worry about doing anything (you know, aside from all that parenting-and-earning-a-living malarkey), and just being. I’ve spent hours happily sewing sock monkeys, reading novel after novel, and surfing the net with as little purpose as a leaf afloat upon the waves.

But always there’s been something niggling at the back of my mind. I think I’ve mentioned before that my job entails writing reports of the sort that every government department produces and no-one much cares to read. I’m considered reasonably good at churning out dry and utilitarian pages on sausage casings, smoking techniques and other meat-related issues, in which there is no call for arresting vocabulary or inventiveness of expression. This week, though, I staged a one-woman rebellion and penned some flowery prose on the characteristics of the latest all-in-one robotic meat slicer and vacuum packing marvel. Such a seemingly small thing as choosing one set of words over another made me disproportionately happy, such that I was grinning and giggling even as I knew I’d be forced to rewrite it. It was then that I thought perhaps it was time to start writing again, time to unblock the outlet for the excess of pomp and overblown construction swirling around in my little brain.

However, the niggle wasn’t content with this. Without the distraction of any other form of recreational writing to keep such thoughts suppressed, I’ve been forced to confront the probability that my skill in writing is not what I judged it to be three or four years ago, when I was fired with the prospect of successively completing my three works in progress and tripping easily down the road to bestselling riches and renown. I’ve come to accept that these few months of doing nothing, achieving nothing connected with questionable talent may not be merely a period of sabbatical, but a reflection of the life I am destined to lead. Excuse me my moment of poor-little-comfortably-off-white-Westerner, but it makes me sad to think that I’ve spent so much of my life foolishly pursuing ambitions that are beyond my reach and dessert. At the end of my life, I had hoped to be able to look back and point out some achievement besides my kids turning out okay despite my terrible mothering. Alas, right now that seems unlikely.

Still, what kind of a deluded self-deceiver would I be if I gave in now? I’ll keep turning on the computer pretending I’m going to get on with some serious writing, even though I know I’ll end up reading about ugly tattoos and uglier handicrafts. I might even start blogging again and pretend that someone cares about my tiresome whining. In that spirit, let’s pretend I’m going off to write a book about sparkly zombies who use magic to solve the mysteries of secretive Moonies, or something. Look out for it on the bestseller shelf!

Thanks for the tea. Toodle-oo!

Let Me Explain...

No, there is too much. Let me sum up:

So, I didn’t win NaNoWriMo this year. It was always going to be a struggle, what with no plot and no unexpected inspiration. Still, I tried to cobble together the hastily-gathered scraps of derivative storyline and clichéd characters into something that could pass for a 50,000 word novel, until it became all too much like hard work, and I was terribly behind on my daily word count, and then…

Mr. Lonie’s dad died. Yes, died. He survived heavy smoking, heavy drinking, Maralinga and Vietnam for 77 years, but the reaper finally caught up with him. I’m not going to be hypocritical and pretend I’m heartbroken, but despite our lack of affection for each other, he was never unkind to me, so that’s something to be grateful for. His death had been coming on for a while – it was just an unfortunate coincidence it happened early in the morning of my very important job interview…

Which, despite being dog-tired from the strains of death-watch and subsequent death, I apparently did really well at, and got the job! Hello, extra $36.00 a fortnight! Woohoo! Now, flush with my new riches, I’ve pretty much decided that…

I will go on official blogging hiatus. An indefinite sabbatical, if you will. It’s not that I don’t have anything more to say, I just don’t have the time or the energy to say it right now (I’m too busy contending for the title of Worst Mother of the Year again. These awards don’t win themselves! There’s screaming to be done! Tempers to be lost! Bad examples to be set!) Anyway, as Mutley delights in reminding me, you, Dear Reader, are not really here reading these words, but are just a fond imagining of my deluded brain. So, you won’t mind if I effect my cunning plan, which involves going away, writing hundreds of posts, then returning to blogging and posting one every single day, thereby pretending I’m a conscientious blogger. So…

Goodbyeeeeeeee!

Can't blog now. NaNo-ing.

Not that I expect everyone to hunch over their computers until I publish each new post, but you might want to lower your expectations still further. NaNoWriMo starts in under two hours and my insides are beginning to clench and churn and froth in a panic reminiscent of that horrid night-before-exams belated cramming I put myself through every year of uni.

I've been trying to figure out a mildly humourous way to finish this post, but I just don't have the energy or the brain power to spare. With ninety minutes to go, I kind of need to save that stuff for things like, oh you know, COMING UP WITH A PLOT TO SUSTAIN ME THROUGH 50,000 WORDS!!! I have no plot, no title, only one character, and a few vague, disjointed ideas that are floating about in my empty, echoing skull, as insubstantial as gossamer and about as difficult to weave into something that could be loosely defined as a novel. With the usual disclaimer about maintaining perspective in the knowledge of multiple, vastly more important global issues, I'm feeling rather sorry for myself.

See you on the other side of November, if I don't come here to cry about it before.