I could have cats

A message for Steve Jobs

For the last week or so, I’ve been awaiting the latest Apple announcement, hoping to hear about an upgraded Macbook Pro. Alas, nothing was revealed except the iPad. Let’s just get this out of our systems, shall we?

iPAD. HEE HEE HEE. TEE HEE HEE. HEEEEEEE.

Hee.

Okay, back to business. The other day, a friend suggested that I write to Steve Jobs and ask if an upgrade is forthcoming because ’sometimes he responds’. I was given no empirical evidence to substantiate this claim, but I thought I’d draft something anyway. 

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Hey Steve,

What’s up? Mary here.

I know this might seem kind of unorthodox and even a bit imprudent seeing as we’re not formally acquainted but I was wondering if you could tell me whether you’re going to update the Macbook Pro anytime soon.

I promise I won’t tell anyone. I just don’t want to be in that situation where you buy a laptop and then three days later, the upgrade is announced and you feel like a boob. Don’t you hate that? I guess it doesn’t make a difference because you would know anyway, and you probably have lots of computers.

Either way, I’d really appreciate being told. In exchange, I won’t tell any period jokes, because I know you’ve been getting those a lot lately. Although, really, what did your marketing team expect? 

I’m so keen on buying a Macbook Pro that I’ve already thought of a name for it: Hugo. I thought about naming it Gryffin, but I already have a bike named Gryffin.

This is my bike:

Thanks for reading and, if you can, let me know about the Pro. That rhymed.

Sincerely,

Mary Kozlovski

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The cushion

Oh, how I pondered what the legacy of my university years would be!

I didn’t really, I just made that up to give this some context.

For the past fortnight, I’ve been writing a draft submission for a magazine and halfway through I realised that my writing was too academic. When I write for someone else, the words tense up.

That pun was unintentional, I swear.

It read like the worst kind of academic essay. Sentences that meandered, wandered back on track, then wandered off again and eventually came to a half-buried point.

It’s not that academic writing is always bad. Sometimes it’s good and occasionally it’s brilliant, but I think writing academically for years has made me anxious about expressing an opinion. It’s so much easier to faff about in an essay, to inflate paragraphs with imperious, noncommittal phrases like ‘One might wonder’ and ‘It could be argued’.

I remember only one tutor who suggested to a roomful of skeptical second-years that we shouldn’t be afraid of using ‘I’ in an essay. We eyed her warily. Who was this loon to encourage a leap into first person narrative? Everything I’d been taught from high school onwards rebelled against it.

I’m finding it hard to write sentences without feeling the need to qualify them. The difference between saying that something seems and something is. To say that something is takes practice because there’s nothing to cushion the opinion.

It’s sitting there unguarded.

This isn’t going to turn into a spiel about the public/private tension on blogs because as a former media and communications student, that topic has been covered. It is strange, though, that I’ve felt far less anxious about writing here and clicking ‘publish’.

Depending on my mood, it’s the healthiest and the riskiest thing I do.

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Violet

Something I’ll miss when I move out is getting my mum to dye my hair for me. On my first attempt, I clumsily coated my ears and neck in violet-red and she’s since insisted on being present whenever I colour it.

In a nice little ritual, I sit on the edge of the bathtub and she busies herself with a bottle and comb, often commenting in not-quite-disapproval, ‘You know, I do like the natural colour of your hair’.

Not that I mind, it’s more of a love-you-the-way-you-are sentiment than a critique, and it’s nice to have a mother who cares that your hair is purple.

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The New Novel

Winslow Homer, The New Novel

watercolour, 1877

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Middle of the night

Three nights ago I went to bed at 8:30pm, something I haven’t done since I was little. It was light outside.

As a child, I would stay up very late, usually reading. Often I’d wait until everyone else was asleep and wander downstairs to do nothing in particular. Sometimes I’d watch a movie.

Yesterday, I started listening to a This American Life podcast. The theme of the show was ‘Middle of the Night’. Ira Glass begins the podcast by describing a job he once had—one of the best jobs he ever had—as a temp typist working nights for a company in New York City. He worked from midnight until the early hours of the morning. He said something about this job that made me smile, because I think it’s partly why I gravitated to bar work as soon as I turned 18. He said that working while the rest of the world slept, and leaving work just when everyone else was waking up, made him feel like he was part of a secret society.

At my first bar job a few years ago, we finished up at about 4am—both too early and too late to sleep. We’d hang around the bar for a bit: some drinking, some smoking. Most people did both. Sometimes we’d order pizza from a place on Elizabeth Street. It was always soggy by the time it arrived. We’d often lock up and migrate to another bar.

I never liked the bars we went to, but I always went. For whatever reason, I was compelled to stay until daylight, at which point the society disbanded, stubbed out their cigarettes and slept it off.

Don’t the sleepers know what they’re missing out on? Maybe you like your sleep and I do too and it’s not always nice at night, but you should still try it.

Parks that don’t look quite real, and uprooted footpaths broken like the top of a cake. You writers of fake shopping lists stroll purposefully, only to walk past the supermarket because you don’t really need detergent. Who does, at this time of night? You just wanted to get out of the house.

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The MasterChef thing

When Australia was in the throes of a love affair with MasterChef, I wasn’t really interested. This is surprising, considering that food is possibly my favourite thing in the world. It’s 3am and I’m eating brie, strawberries and plums. Throw on a beret and some Edith Piaf and this is Paris.

The hoo-haa about Matt Preston’s cravats was annoying and I desperately wanted Twitter to return to a simpler time when #masterchef didn’t exist. As one acquaintance remarked, “What is a Poh?”

People kept telling me how dramatic MasterChef was and I kept picturing Matt Preston looming over an aspirant chef, smirking, and saying things like, “So—thought you’d make a soufflé, did you?”

Giggles! Then, I finally watched an episode and it was totally like that.

A few weeks later, Preston’s Cravat-A-Licious appeared in bookstores and the cycle of absurdity was complete.

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My little sister’s language

parler – to speak

je parle

tu parles

il/elle/on parle

nous parlons

vous parlez

ils/elles parlent

I always liked verb conjugation. There’s rhythm and repetition and it’s a relaxing activity when the brain is spent of invention or creativity. Even if the verbs are irregular and their conjugation seemingly random, it is still a process of clicking language into place. Rhythm and repetition.

It’s a bit like this.

By the end of my trip, I was weary of navigating foreign languages, because country-hopping and contending with so many over the course of a few weeks is tiring. German; Czech; back to German; French; Dutch (although Amsterdam was almost bilingual Dutch-English); back to German; Italian.

I feel guilty when I don’t even know basic words, enough to muddle it to the natives. It seems lazy and kind of rude. Those different sounds jostled together and I despaired that languages left to their own devices are like Polaroids that fade instead of becoming clearer.

Ah, languages: as complex as they are interesting. I like, for instance, German’s ß (Eszett in German, apparently) and how the capitalisation of nouns makes the written language look like a city block.

Then I was surprised by the French I recalled when I was surrounded by it. Sentences, tenses and vocabulary—a whole archeology under my skull. The word for ’stairs’—l’escalier/les escaliers—fell out of my mouth after a moment’s pause. Last night, I dug out my trusty Schaum’s Outlines, French Grammar: Fourth Ed., now yellowed and with adolescent doodles on the cover.

The gender system is part of what makes French grammar difficult, especially because the assignation of gender to a noun is largely arbitrary.

10. _____ mère laisse _____ lettre sur _____ bureau.

It makes sense that the answers are la mère, la lettre and le bureau and to reverse them sounds utterly wrong.

Then there are the languages that don’t make sense to me at all. My little sister is quite the language buff—she’s doing French and Japanese in Year 12 this year and wants to take a gap year after she finishes high school.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve indulged in a sporadic ‘lol’ here and there. There’s even been a ‘whatevs’ and, on one drunken occasion, I forgot to say these words ironically. How embarro!

I don’t understand my little sister’s language. Take this excerpt from Facebook:

noooo ur so cute!

OOH btw WE MUST TALK SOONIES

and this:

trewwwww

Isn’t it more of an effort to capitalise and misspell words so frequently than it is to just spell them correctly?

Kids—I don’t get them.

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The mayor of Rome

“I’m not taking questions.”

“Imbeciles.”

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Snore

Shouldn’t there be some kind of punishment for people who snore explosively in hostel dorms?

I know that people who snore can’t help it and yet, isn’t it unjust that the person who snores all night gets to sleep?

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That day

Every person I know who has travelled has told me about today. The day where your body gives out, the flu tablets aren’t good for shit, you’re sick of packing your backpack and rifling around for clean underwear; sick of navigating maps/train stations/public transport/foreign languages, even sick of fatty local food and you just want to fly home and nestle in your dent in the couch and watch Mary Poppins with a block of chocolate and a bottle of gin. Today is the day where I want nothing more than my predictable routine back.

Yes, I know it passes. Time for more mousse.

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