The 2am List: episode one
Things that characters say on television that nobody ever says in real life
“I’d like that.”
“Just let me explain.”
“I’m carrying your child.”
“…[insert woman's name], wait!”
“McDreamy.”
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Not just another blog
For a couple of weeks, I’ve been considering a thematic blog. I was never going to do away with cats and this idea was not in any way a slight, so she can stop looking at me like that. It was borne of restlessness and the fleeting desire for a new project. My ideas were patchy, hovering around books/publishing/writing and other such things.
This seemed like a good idea until I realised it would likely be dull—both for people to read and for me to write—and that there are book blogs aplenty and the world doesn’t need another. The world may not need cats either, but I do, and as someone who just gave herself elbow carpet-burn (which is now stinging), I think one blog is enough responsibility. Maybe I’ll create a category for my bookish bilge, seeing as it crops up so frequently.
If I’m moving too fast for you, that’s too bad. That’s just how I roll.
Vroom.
Also, if I had a blog that was about only a few things in the universe, then I couldn’t put up pictures like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Chestertang
You’d be all: ‘Mary, what does that have to do with books and publishing and seriousness?’
The answer is: everything, but that’s another post.
Something in the water
Weather, you bring out the worst in people. It took me two hours to get out of the city tonight. With flash flooding, an AC/DC reunion on one side and a Taylor Swift concert on the other, the city clogged like tissue in a drain. After an emergency phone call to my mum, I spent forty minutes wading outside The Forum in a pair of empuddled sandals that made my feet prune.
You see the same kind of craziness when the weather gets unbearably hot. Drivers tooting, trams binging, people sprinting and sloshing. Swimming in the road. The crowd of people waiting for my tram heaved and surged as the doors pulled up. Nobody would even let the people who wanted to get off the tram down the stairs. My sister says she thinks that’s what a war must be like.
Paper
So I’m cleaning my room and there’s so much paper. Who needs this much paper? I like to think that I am environmentally-conscious which is why I cancelled the delivery of the Yellow and White Pages to our doorstep. I wonder if this means that people who work on the Yellow and White Pages will lose their jobs, or maybe they’ll just get ’shifted to online’. Which is code for ‘got boned’.
Anyway, so much paper and I really honestly just wanted to pitch everything in my room out the fucking window. What the hell do I need the readings from my public policy class last semester sitting in this pile on my desk for? Will I read them? Maybe. Will I really read them? No.
So I’m tearing up and throwing these bits of paper into this enormous cardboard bag that I got from the Swedish homewares supply store back when I thought that the world would be still for a second if I stacked my receipts in Swedish pastel-coloured boxes. It wasn’t still, and now I have a stack of Swedish pastel-coloured boxes on my bedroom floor. They’re sitting next to these other two Swedish boxes that look like roof thatching, from back when I thought that dusting off and alphabetising my CD collection would make the world sit still for a minute. It didn’t and now I have these boxes sitting on my bedroom floor. On top of those boxes are those plastic money bags that banks use. They’re full of shrapnel that sat in a jar in my wardrobe for about a year and a half. Loose change and bar tips that made my wallet fat.
There’s something really sad about those bags of change.
I find these passport photos in a paper frame on my desk and they’re dusty. I think I was too bleached out for the authorities to use them, so I rip them into four or five pieces. For a second before I throw them in the Swedish homewares bag, I think that I should tape them back together.
It’s a stupid idea. What am I, in fucking Amelie? So I throw them out and there’s still so much shit in my room.
I’m not drunk, by the way.
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.
——————————————————————————————————————
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
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.
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.
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.
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.