Today

Today I rose with a million women,

and booked it with the Jezebelles,

all in all, a thoroughly enjoyable, enriching day,

reinforcing the twin powers of thinking and doing

("Wonder Twin powers -- ACTIVATE!")

and the possibilities inherent in every London day,

should I seek it out, venturing beyond the endless ennui of Come Dine With Me ,

and its bloodless ilk.

Joy:

It's out there.

Seek it out. Revel in it. Be inspired. Write.

Be To. Or Be To Not.

(The former is infinitely preferable)

"The Big Chill" at The Big Chill

Have you seen the '80s film "The Big Chill" (Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, Jeff Goldblum)? It centres on a group of friends going through all this heavy psychoshit over a weekend? Well Team Chill - members of the April and Oscar Send Off posse - had many, many memorable moments but instead of angst and drama, we had crazy giggles, messy debauchery and the bloodiest best. time. evah!!!! In fact, from now on, I shall refer to it as Bestival - 'cos it's the best (fest)ival I've ever been to!

The following videos are a bit dumb. Should I remove them? Vote "yes" or "no" in the comment section.

I Don't Like Cricket, Oh No ...

Mr Plog's Facebook Status Report (as of an hour ago):

"Mr P ... is very happy to be leaving Lords early. First defeat of the Aussies there in over 70 years. Come on!"

I commented "Seventy years? Bless!"

It was meant to sound patronising but my buddy from home, J, quickly wrote:
"Don't buy into this, Doc!"

So not!, J, my brother from another mother, no need to worry. But I am schlepping naches from the fact that Mr P is facebook friends with friends of mine from home. How effing sad is that, People? I am thirty-five-long-drawn-out-mostly-mentalist-years-old and I sound like a tweenager. Still, friends have always excited me more than sports. Like Mr P says, I'm not a real Australian. I don't like sport, I don't like beer. That's about all our national identity is based on, right?

You'd think it if you lived over here. Representations of Australianness in Britain are unbelievably outmoded, simplistic, and monolithic. I've been making notes in the five years I've lived here and thinking about a larger project, tentatively titled From Cocking Fosters to Sheila's Wheels. It's mad that in a supposedly postmodern, postracial, postfeminist (???) world we continue to obscure the fact that beyond every bullshit construct, we are all human. Surely that fact is more relevant than the place we were born or the accents we affect?

Strewth!

Farewell To A Father

Thinking today of my friend, A, whose father just passed away after a long illness. I never met him but he was by all accounts a wonderful character, a wise, twinkling, gregarious, Greek (there is a scene in her wedding video that contains the most vibrant, riotous version of the "Zorba the Greek" dance with him at the centre!), kind, warm mensch of a man.

His funeral tomorrow morning will be the first I am attending since my own dad's in October 2006, so I am having the requisite bad dreams and sudden, sinking, sickly day sweats. I am remembering the feelings that A must be feeling: that unreality, heavy waking nightmarishness of going through the motions, accepting condolences, smiling wanly at the platitudes ("No, it's not a relief!"; "No, he's not better off now he's not in pain, he would be a lot fucking happier being alive and in pain with ME!!!"*), the realisation that nothing will ever be the same again, never would I feel as complete again, never would I be loved so thoroughly, so unconditionally ever again. That even happy times, from this day until the day I die, would be tempered with sadness, fracturedness. Maybe that's part of why I rail against the Wedding Industrial Complex to the rabid degree I do - as much as I love Mr. Plog - and by Jove, I do! - it won't be the goddamned Happiest Day Of My LifeTM (C) The Walt Disney Corporation 1956 because my. dad. is. dead.

Apologies to A. This was meant to be a missive of healing, of solidarity. Look, it does get better - it has to. The vomit-inducing cliches are the truest: Time Heals, Life Goes On. Those initial days, months - that unreality, those Moments of Magical Thinking** (mine involved me getting upset each week that passed after he died, because the longer time went on, the less likely it was that I'd get a call saying it was all a mistake - even though I had literally watched him die) - seem like semi-distant memories mostly. But today, this minute, I am reliving them, and the rawness feels stinging, searing.

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*Which in hindsight and with reflection is sadly probably not true (I mean he joked constantly about wanting to make an appointment with his "good friend, Dr Kevorkian" -- but hey, I guess it proves we all see what we want to see, especially when it comes to our parents ...)

**Please read Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking if you haven't, especially if you are grieving. I bought it at Hong Kong airport on my way back to London after my dad's funeral and was so captivated that I read the whole thing before landing despite the cocktail of Mogadon, Xanax and Nytol I'd taken to cope with the solo 22 hour journey in that frame of mind.

***Please note that the image of woodworking tools is a tribute to one of my dad's greatest passions, not a lazy shorthand equating masculinity with hardware. As if I wood do that!

Glasto Envy

This is the first year since moving to the UK that I am missing Glastonbury.

And I am really, REALLY missing Glastonbury! Couldn't even bring myself to listen to Jo Whiley this morning.

A mate there just heard Pete Doherty and Jason Mraz backstage working out an arrangement of "The Girl Is Mine". Would be so collectively cathartic to be there In
Light Of (I so buy into this whole thing, sorry if you don't. Diana almost killed me!)

Storms or no storms, my heart lies in Somerset this weekend.

Doctor D

Dr D, unlike your erstwhile Dr P, was a real doctor. A medical one, with the knowledge of the uppermost consultant and the heart of a saint, the bedside manner of a goddess, the integrity of nobody you will ever meet. She was an angel. She was too good to be true. And some days, it's hard to believe she ever was ...

She was born on this day in 1974. She was killed in a stupid car accident in 2004. She was the worst person to die, worst as far as confirming to an already cynical mind that there is no rhyme nor reason, no method to the madness, no steadying hand helping us along in a pretty, karmic fair-balanced way. There is no Grand Narrative justifying everything. That she died disproved everything faith-related. (My grandfather's Auschwitz days helped along in that regard, but, then again, that didn't happen directly to me. The ego is a powerful thing.)

I have suffered a few episodes of depression, of varying degrees of awfulness. (I am good now, and have been for several years.) But in those bleak times I did think at times, Why her? Why her and not me, when I am concealing myself behind curtained doonas and Xanax fogs, and she would be out there engaging, enjoying, doing, helping, being? It scares me writing this, it's not something I've ever articulated. But it feels safe to recall publicly with regard to her memory.

She was sooooooo amazing - to which all her many, many friends would attest. I wish beyond wishing that I was calling her now to wish her "Happy, happy, happy birthday, my beautiful, darling D!" instead of writing this horrible eulogy. I will never stop loving her and I continue to take inspiration from her life.


xxx

Page By Post

En route to Rochelle Rochelle, who was the first to respond to the previous post, although it is unlikely that the page will have an adventure on par with a young girl's erotic journey from Milan to Minsk ...

Sisterhood Of Shoes?!? I Mean, Really?!?

This can't be real?

You have to check out the Trojan Tickler ad on the comments page. Old ladies need self-love too? Gross!
/sarcasm

Thanks to Sarah Haskins for ALWAYS keeping it real and to all my Lady Friends, old and new, for offering something a little more special than sales pitches when we hang out. And especial big hugs to Y, who was mentioned in the clip ...

Untying The Knot: The Wedding Porn Edition

Fun Fact! The Wedding Industrial Complex turns over 17 billion dollars annually in the US alone. There are a fuckload of people whose livelihoods depend on the fact that every womanTM wants to be a big white pavlova princess! With photographers and flowers and bands, oh my! I am doing research into porn at the moment and it's amazing how wedding ephemera are fetishised and framed in a similar way to the boobs and bush(less)es on the screen. And I'm actually having trouble working out which is more degrading to women but leaning heavily to the Bride's Side of the Aisle (There is an actually a generic hybrid - link NSFW= Not Safe For Work, ie. dirty images ensue!- unsurprisingly. What is too niche for porn? Absolutely nothing! But that's another post.)

So for years I've had my very own dream wedding in mind. A non-wedding: the dream not to have one, just to be this cool iconolclastic goddess teetering on the edge of respectability, laughing in the face of the bourgeoisie, just me and Susan Sarandon and our Gauloises and arthouse fillums and young toyboys and air of general disdain ... Sorry, where was I? Yes. Not getting married. I'd studied the origins of the institution at university and am not a fan. In fact one of my all-time favourite quotes is Groucho Marx's "Marriage is a wonderful institution but who wants to live in an institution?".

Unfortunately this bloody man comes along and we bloody well have to fall in love and bloody want to make it legal for a variety of reasons so Ms. BigMouth now looks like a hegemony-happy, heteronormative hypocrite of the highest order. And it's bittersweet because I am in love but ultimately shackling myself to something that represents so much of what I viscreally, venally despise. But why can't I reframe the experience on my terms? I like big parties and the accompanying food and booze (a little too much sometimes, to which my not-ready-for-summer-bikini-bodTM attests) and we are doing it in Australia!!! It will be our one and only opportunity to gather our various family and friends from opposite sides of the world in one room, integrating so far disparate fragments of our lives and I can't bloody WAIT! We are lucky to have many people making the LONG trip over. If I'd just said "Party in Oz!" it wouldn't happen, no matter how enticing the invitation. But the biggest bonus for me is the official blending of our families - we only have small ones (mine is just my mum, brother, sister-in-law and me) so now he will have my relatives and I will have his, and life feels more supported, in a way. That's what I'm in this for. And, seriously, to hell with all that excess, misogynist (women = monolithic; Which SATC character are you?! I'm a Carrie!!!) WICrapola!

But what is freaking people the fuck out is that I'm not treating the wedding as the be-all and end-all of my existence and I'm not thinking of myself as some new person getting! married! at all: I'm just me, as me, doing a thing that doesn't define me any more than the fact that I have worn glasses for over two straight months (bloody iritis!) and am nursing some killer cramps today. (Missy P FTW!)

When we got engag[g]ed, I changed my facebook status to:"Doctor Plog is taking on the Wedding Industrial Complex". My old friend N wrote:"Good luck with the Wedding Industrial Complex! You will need all your super powers to ward off their insanity". I'm learning that these super powers include: the ability to block out white noise (venues, blah blah, rabbis, blah, blah) and to resist the temptation to punch anyone who refers to you as a bride/ the bride -- hang on, the wedding isn't for a few months. And lasts for how many hours? THAT'S where I'll be playing the role of "the bride", then and then only. But it's an inane title foisted upon you from proposal until the wedding where you become known as the equally preposterous thing called "wife"! I would have thought you were just the bride at the wedding but I guess for marketing purposes, the second you become engaged you become repackaged as a new consumer - one that is expected not to bat an eyelid at spending ridiculous amounts of money on idiotic things. Capitalism relies on the erasure of individual desire in order to effectively perpetuate the mass-market, so our very own wants come to us genetically modified and prepackaged, via spam email or billboard or word-of-mouth or the cultural osmosis that has kept the world going and institutions standing. Isn't it unlikely that EVERY Western woman getting married (age 17 - 70) just happens to have always "dreamed" of having exactly the same thing, irrespective of variabilities in age, experience and subjectivity?

And look at "The Package" itself, Hegemony-Style (£10,000+)! Big white dress, big white teeth, golden tan, slimmer bod in order that the photos be perfect, ripe for self-fetishisation, post-children, in the mournful knowledge that one will never look like that again. Lucky for me, I don't look like that now! In fact, perversely, post-proposal, I have started rapidly gaining weight. Even my body is rejecting this nuptial nonsense! It wants to become a plus-size bride and at this stage I'm letting it. (Come November I'll more than likely freak out and stop eating though. Disordered Eating Runs Deep.)

So here's a wee anecdote to illustrate the idiocy: My lovely mum was in town for a few weeks. Last Friday, we accidentally caught the the tube to Angel so looked at a few shops and saw a nice dress. Then we caught the tube to Selfridges, looked around for an hour, bought aforementioned Angel-sourced dress (gotta love high street chains and their multitudinous replications!) and a pair of shoes dispayed next to dress. Wedding costume shopping: done! Feelin' gooooood!

Then my lovely, proud mum made the fatal (ego-wise) error of sharing our pleasure with the Bitch Sales Assistant. The following scene ensued:

Mum: (to Bitch Sales Assistant) It's for her wedding!
Bitch: (to me, disbelievingly) For your wedding?
Me: (sheepishly) Uh ... yeah.
Bitch: (bitchily) How come you're not wearing a wedding dress?
Me: (having felt pretty and happy only minutes earlier, now wanting the ground to swallow me whole) Um ... didn't really want the big white dress thing ... (apologetically) It's not really me (attempting humour weakly) And ... um ... not everyone looks good in white...
Bitch: Yeah that's what I thought when I was getting married but then you just get swept up in it. (unconvincingly) Oh well, I guess you just want something you feel nice in.
Me: (gratefully) Yes, exactly.

Silly fucking bitch. She's probably still paying off her multi-thousand pound confection. But mostly silly fucking me for letting myself be intimidated by a silly twat who's probably a decade younger than I am. It gets worse though: I am a fatherless daughter and so many of the rituals are enshrined around that relationship, albeit (a word my dad once pronounced al-bait, as if to rhyme with the 'arbeit' from 'makht frei' - he'd only ever seen it written - how cute is that?) shitty rituals based on the chattel (woman) being traded between older man and younger man. So I may have pissed off my dad with my militancy were he around, but then again, if all this crapola weren't so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious, I wouldn't have the issue in the first place. So it's also making me really sad too and missing him all the time and it's affecting my sleeping. Boo To The WIC! Causing insomnia as well as Keeping The Woman Down (forcing us to want all this poo and then condemning those who do buy into it with the monstrous Bridezilla trope).

I am not a knee-jerk, pounce-on-every-perceived-cliche feminist -- it's a lot more complex, and beautiful, than that -- but I believe that there are valuable lessons us sad straights desperately need to learn from our gay sisters and brothers in their (necessary) use of gender nonspecific language. Our appropriation of that seems to render the marital roles more fluid, less prescribed. The words "husband" and "wife" are anachronistic to me, aged, outdated and a bit passe, as they carry with them centuries of baggage -- much of which has no place in my home, thank you very much. At their heart they imply a relationship of non-equals, a predetermined power differential. We are partners, equals. We walk down the aisle together, I won't be "given" to him. We wear matching wedding bands, he doesn't get to "bags" me with a diamond (the male-to-female equivalent of throwing a jacket on a chair) which only became a symbol of enduring love in the 1940s when Frances Gerety, a copywriter, came up with slogan "A Diamond Is Forever". If Mr P and I want to live according to the sub/dom paradigm (not an interest to date, as far as I know) then let choice determine who gets to play which role rather than anatomy.

Also, ixnay on the name changing menace. I'm a grown woman and that name is me: I've always been called it! (To those who reply "But that's just your father's name!" - duh! Have I just been renting it these past three-and-a-half decades?) But beyond discussions of patriarchy, it just feels like a weird, flee-from-self type of thing to do. There are only two legitimate reasons a person ought to change their name and I am neither in Witness Protection nor appearing in a porno. (Although re: the latter, who knows what the future holds? I am, after all, getting married, which is the feminist equivalent of lying back, shutting your eyes tightly, and getting well and truly schtupped by the patriarchy. It may as well be available on DVD. Sorry, Sisterhood.)

I hate you, WIC.

But, even more, I love you, Mr P. I especially love the fact that you don't mind living in a state that is perpetually subject to deconstruction and reconfiguration. We're so meta! And it proves your gender identity is far more secure than your friends -- I'm looking at you, D and M! Hello boys and Welcome To The Blogosphere! -- would have us believe.

xxx

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Have you read Zadie Smith's On Beauty? It's a really great novel. But, more importantly, it's a really great novel that has randomly fallen to bits in our spare room-cum-my-study which has given me an odd meta-idea I am sooo gonna regret in the sober ... I mean, um, morning, but:

If you would like a page from this book, please send me a postal address and one will be on its way!! Creeps, sociopaths, trolls, psychopaths, misogynists, homphobes, conservatives, murderers, morons, misandrists, gun-owners, people who have flags on their lawn and anyone who voted for the Tories yesterday or John Howard like ever totally need not apply.

ps. It would help if I know you, either personally or via the blogosphere. If you're a total stranger don't be one! Who are you?, as CSI (the original and BEST!) and Led Zeppelin would ask, more than a few times: Who, who?

Smells Like Teen Spirit 2: Incense Boogaloo

Addendum: Hey, just had another thought about incense. Around 1990, my very talented friend A (brother of my very talented friend, L) wrote a song about me called "Everyone Loves [insert Dr Plog's real name here]" -- with such foresight, I hasten to add: this predates Raymond by how long? Anyvey, it contained these lines: She ordains herself in incense before she goes to school which technically wasn't true, but interesting, especially in light of a later anecdote.

In 2005, when I moved to London, I maybe went a bit overboard with trying to establish my corner ... um, half ... actually probably more like three quarters of the apartment. A friend, D, to this day gives me shit about my "shrine" of photos of friends from home, which may have been sitting on some silk scarves which may happen to have been near some burning incense. D felt it necessary to grab some rice from the pantry and make an offering to the gods.

So I do have a history with the stuff. At one point I even decided to call my imaginary, hypothetical daughter Keturah because it's Hebrew for incense ... shit, I'm way more implicated than I thought! I had never considered this mini-history before.

So what's your "incense"? What's something that you always elect to have around you, something that's so normalised in your environment that you take it for granted, yet it's not something that everyone has or even likes? (It can't be a person though. That could get mighty bitchy.)