When I was growing up, I wanted to be a –

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yr_12_ex_book_cover.jpgAn archaeologist. That was the first thing I remember saying I wanted to be, when the teacher asked the primary school class what we’d like to be. Other ideas around the class were air hostess and astronaut. Interesting … I’ve just noticed that all these coveted careers start with the letter A.

But by the time I was nine, I wanted to be a writer. It was then that I wrote a long – I would say impressively long – story about going right out the back, away from the house, as far as the second levee bank, and finding a lump of wood. I lifted this lump and there was a hole. I went down the hole (could have been inspired by Alice) and came out in another dimension. Somehow I was suddenly in outer space. I had a few adventures out there, came back out of the hole, repositioned the lump of wood, and thence home.

I started keeping a journal when I was eleven. I wrote it in a school exercise book. When I filled it, I started another. I now have cardboard boxes full of exercise books full of bleating. (When I talk to myself, I tend to bleat.)

In high school I intuited that I might be seen as a wanker if I said I wanted to be a writer, so I went for something nearby, which was journalism. Which is basically what I ended up doing, once I realised I needed a proper job. That, and community arts, which was also nearby in the sense that it was creative and it involved a lot of writing (of grant applications). And video script writing. That kind of flowed out of the community arts stuff. And making videos. That flowed out of the script writing. All of which paid some bills but was never the thing I got so excited about at nine, when I wrote myself into outer space and got myself home safely in time for dinner.

And then, last year, I got extremely ill and thought drat, I never really pursued that writing thing. Not properly.

But then I got better. So now I’m doing it. I’m writing and writing and writing and writing. To make me write, I’ve got myself a personal bootcamp instructor, Charlotte Wood. She is a magician! Woo!

Okay, that’s the end of this blog post. Thanks to Twitter followers @RoseyChang and @Lynsm7 for suggesting this topic. I Tweeted that I needed a suggestion for my blog post tonight, and they tweeted “When I was growing up, I wanted to be a …” and “there’s a book in everyone” respectively.

 

In the pixels

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pixelateI’ve been away with the pixies over the past few days. Actually, not pixies, but pixels. And bits, bytes and video codecs. I’ve been in the digital trenches, waiting for the blue (or yellow) progress bar to creep across the screen. This is the line, sometimes accompanied by a soft, digital purr, that says, “leave it to me, go and have a cup of tea, I’m on it.” As it lengthens – at glacial speed – it gives updates on its progress. “I’ve done 12 percent, aren’t I good? Now I’ve done 13 percent. Anyway, stop watching me. You’re making me nervous.”

I once spent a year in a clothing factory sewing 300 collars on to 300 shirts each day. I wouldn’t recommend it, but at least you can build up a sort of rhythm if you’re sewing collars; you can watch the clock; you can create a pile of collared shirts. In digital pixie land, it’s just that progress bar. And it seems to have stopped moving. So you go and put the kettle on. You get back and it’s on 86 percent, 93 per cent and … uh oh. The industrious purr gives way to a demented spasm of defeat. The screen goes white-grey, an elegant Steve Jobs whitish-grey. It’s like snow. A blizzard. Everything with any meaning has vanished. You are sitting there with teacup in hand, frozen with dismay.

You have to start again.

All I was trying to do was output a short video from gorgeous timelapse footage created by a beautiful and talented local artist (Nicole Welch). The footage showed clouds and stars moving across the sky through night and day. The whooshing clouds were gorgeous. But they were pixilating.

Pixilation is where things look all square and blocky and jagged and digital rather than smooth and rounded.

It was driving us nuts. Video codecs were proliferating and moving away in space like endlessly spiraling fragments of faulty DNA. Nicole dreamed she had to render her whole body. I woke at 3am thinking, PRO RES 4444.

PRO RES 4444.

Nicole struck up a relationship with a German technogenius by the name of Gunter who was happy to give advice any time of day or night. His face was a little pixilated square in the lower right hand corner of her screen. Gunter emailed instructions to Nicole, and Nicole forwarded them to me.

Still, pixilation.

And then, after a night of rest, a Sabbath, of being turned off at the wall, of a rinsing out if the mind, my computer managed to get all the way to 97 per cent, 98, 99 and – hallelujah – 100 per cent. The progress bar suddenly vanished, but the computer didn’t crash. The last little leap to completion was done so airily, so casually, as if it was no big deal. I stared at the screen for while, not daring to hope. With shaking hands, I clicked on the file. It opened. No pixelation. Just smoothness. Blessedly smooth billowing swooshing clouds. Smooth night sky.

Heaven.

Help Deb make a difference!

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Deb_Tracy_Nighties_early_70sMy first memories of Deb are sketchy.

My Pop hands me a doll. We seem to be high on a balcony. Decades later Mum and I work out that this could be a memory of the day Deb was born. The balcony might have been at the Mater hospital in Brisbane. I can’t have been more than 22 months old because that’s how old I was when Deb joined us.

And then there’s Deb in a cot, and me standing next to it with chocolate cake in my hand. I divide up the cake, some for Deb, some for me. I give her the cakey bit and keep the icing for myself. I was only two and a half years old but I already understood that she had no idea she was being diddled. I remember that actual wicked thought.

And then Deb was my companion all through childhood. And the decades rolled by and one day, on the phone, Deb said she had bad news and I immediately thought something must have happened with Dad. But it was about Deb herself. She had breast cancer.

That was five years ago. Since then, we’ve both discovered we’re carriers of the BRCA1 gene mutation and I’ve joined her in the cancer trip, only mine was of the ovaries, which is generally considered to be the nastier straw to draw.

As I’ve documented elsewhere on this blog, the BRCA1 gene mutation is a horrible piece of work. When I was in Tasmania earlier this year, I saw a poignant drawing by Melbourne artist Cassandra Laing on the wall at the MONA museum. The drawing is of a photograph of two young girls beside a dead and tagged bird lying on its back. The title is “Darwin’s Girls” and it’s about Laing’s own inherited predisposition to breast cancer. Mutation allows evolution. It’s through the infinite possibilities, the trillions of “mistakes” made in the genetic code, that species evolve and become more robust. Meanwhile, the same process can cause all sorts of grief for individual families.

Both Cassandra Laing and her older sister Amanda died early – in their late thirties – of breast cancer.

Fortunately, Deb and I are now in the clear. On Sunday, October 25, Deb is going to take part in the Seven Bridges Walk to raise money for the Cancer Council. It’ll be a 27 kilometre walk around part of the spectacular Sydney Harbour. I can’t go myself because I’m already committed to the Plants and Animals exhibition here in Bathurst, but I’ll be there in spirit! See Deb’s donation page here, if you’d like to support the cause.

My smooth toadlet

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ToadI’ve been off on a minor amphibian journey over the past few days. Poking around at the Junktion next to the tip in Bathurst, where you can dump stuff that deserves a second chance before going into landfill, I found a toad. It’s a painting of a rather magnificent toad, or perhaps frog, in the garb of a nineteenth century gentleman in a faux gilt frame. He’ll be just perfect in the 200 Plants and Animals exhibition in October. The exhibition will be a showcase of local, Bathurstian plants and animals, so this guy will need a makeover to take him out of generic frog/toadness into a specific local species. After a little Facebook consultation with local ecologists, I settled on turning him into a smooth toadlet (Uperoleia laevigata). He looks pretty smooth.

This guy is not a true toad. Australia, I’m told, has no true native toads, although we have a lot of frogs that are called “toadlets”. They’re all just frogs, really. So, what’s the difference between a frog and a toad? Apparently a toad has dry skin, a stumpy body and small legs; frogs have slippery bodies, narrow waists and big muscly thighs, good for jumping.

We may not have native toads but we do, of course, have cane toads, famously and disastrously introduced to eat up the beetles that were eating up the sugar cane crops. They made their way up through Northern Queensland, across the Northern Territory and are now marching through the north of Western Australia, wreaking havoc. The western Australian government’s has a 42 point action strategy for combating them. I just had a glance down the list. It’s all about stakeholder engagement and databases but reading between the lines, it’s all about one thing: Kill them.

Speaking of toads, I spent a frustrating hour or so (way too long!) trying to get to the bottom of the famous advice about eating a toad first thing every morning, because after that, nothing in your day will be quite as disgusting; everything else will be a cinch by comparison. The idea has been attributed to Mark Twain and Schopenhauer but it appears to have come originally from Nicolas Chamfort. I had no need for a toad breakfast today. I enjoyed the almost-spring sunshine and went for a swim. I did some frog-kick.

Meanwhile, Mum has agreed to create a portrait of the pobblebonk frog. Here’s one making its characteristic “bonk” sound. Apparently it’s only the males that make this noise, and they make it because they’d like to – bonk. (I’m sure the name comes from the sound rather than the intention.) Here’s one now:

The first hint of spring

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What’s that in the air? Could it be a hint that this winter might one day end? We’ve had our snow, we’ve had our shocking news, we’ve had streets of trees without leaves. But there’s a trace of warmth in the air. And on Rocket Street, up the hill, there’s a tree in full pink blossom. Yes, it’s quite possible that – in a few weeks’ time – we might emerge from this winter into spring.

In my own garden, it’s Yellow Flower Season (YFS). The Cootamundra wattle is blooming and the daffodils are out.

Not only that, but I’m ten out of ten! I’ve just had my latest three-monthly cancer check, and my CA125 level is 10. Considering that when my tumours were in full flight my level was in the late two thousands, this is a magnificent result. It’s now a year since my last dose of chemo. Life stretches out, lazily, ahead.

A little too lazily. I’m still having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. At the appointed time, it still feels like it must be 4am and what the hell is going on?

Pattern by WhittyB/Etsy

Oh, I finally finished the cross-stitched uterus and ovaries for my gynae-oncologist. I forgot to take a photo before I handed it over, but it looked just like this. I added the words “Here’s trouble” because that’s basically all I got out of decades of female reproductive organs. My doctor, a brisk, practical woman (I worship her, along with my Upper GIT*), looked at it briefly and said, “Good stitching.” And: “I’m not sure where I’m going to put this.” She’s not one to fake joy – too busy. But I don’t mind. I enjoyed making it & I really don’t mind what she does with it.

On Wednesday, I’m going to be delivering a little talk about my crocheted body parts at Nepean TAFE in Kingswood at 1pm. The general public is welcome, so if you’re in that part of town, feel free to pop in! Details from Cath Barcan at Catherine.Barcan@tafensw.edu.au.

* Upper Gastro Intestinal Tract surgeon