Kirsten Alexander's Open Salon Blog

How Edward Helped Me Out

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:10:06 -0400

I’ve just discovered something and would like to share it, and to know if others have had the same experience.

This afternoon, at three-thirty, I drove to my son’s primary school to collect him and his friend Edward, who was coming to our house to play for a few hours. The pick-up went as they always do: I chatted to other parents as we navigated the school yard, talking about holidays just gone or upcoming, swapping details of tradespeople, babysitters, restaurants and the like, until the bell sounded and the doors to the classrooms were flung open. I watched my six-year-old son tumble down the wooden stairs to the yard, laden with his schoolbag, football, the craft creation of the day, and dripping bits of paper from his unzipped bag as he made his way towards me. Walking beside him was Edward, who was looking straight ahead and talking, to me, though we were still a good five metres away from one another.

Edward continued to talk to me through my greeting, our walk back to the car, as he buckled himself in, and while I rolled down the window to greet a mother I’d not seen in the yard.

On the ride home, Edward talked my son and I through the day’s catalogue of injuries, one of which was particularly galling because it came exactly atop an injury he’d sustained to his knee the day before, which was also a spot where mosquitoes bit him. He listed his worst-ever injuries, in order of where he was in the world when they happened, then explained they were nothing in comparison with what would happen when the tsunami came tomorrow. He said the tsunami would come from the north and would reach his house by the end of the morning, just as it had in the 1700s, the decade in which his sister had been born. By my silent reckoning this meant the tsunami would be rolling in from the arid lands of northern Victoria, an area usually prefaced with the description ‘the drought-ridden area of’, and his sister is considerably older than she looks.

I assured him that I’d listened to the weather reports during the day and that no tsunami was forthcoming. He replied this was good since it meant we could visit the café he went to on Saturday with his mother, where he ate ham and cheese pancakes and was served by a bearded man who has lost twelve kilos since Christmas. He said his meal at the café was so filling that he could get through only two-thirds of it, maybe three-fifths, but that if we ordered something else from the menu we might have better luck finishing. He said that we should definitely not order anything with honey in it because honey is bee spit. The pancakes were very good, he repeated. They were probably the best thing he’d ever had now that he thought about it. But not as good as the party he was going to on the weekend, to which my son has not been invited.

The drive from the school to our home takes eight minutes. Edward did not waste one second of it. His monologue was funny, tedious and intriguing in turn. I marvelled at his ability to move from thought to thought with absolutely no self-consciousness or self-censorship. I was slightly jealous.

Prior to driving to school I’d been sitting at my desk, berating myself for frittering away a whole day when I supposed to be writing an article that was due the next morning. It happens sometimes that I find myself with a blessedly open day immediately before a piece of work is due. The weather was overcast, the phone was quiet and the house was clean. I had a fresh pot of coffee to one side of my laptop and a neat pile of notes to the other. And yet, the words didn’t come. I’d interviewed a perfectly lovely and articulate woman about her new book and had only to fashion the interview into an article for an editor I know to be supportive and approachable. But I didn’t type a sentence worth keeping all day.

Then, in the car, while I was trying to keep up with the stream of babble from the back seat, half-listening to the news headlines from the radio, noticing I needed petrol, and that the car in front of me had a broken brake light, it came to me in a rush, a gush. The whole structure of the article hit me like one of those wide, clean, quick-flowing rivers you see in Canada, and I knew which quote to start with, how to whip the middle mess into shape, and how to close with a snap. It came seemingly out of nowhere and for that brief moment, while I could still hear a faint wash of noise in the background, I experienced the only moment of clarity I’d had all day.

When we arrived home, I stayed in the car for a moment scribbling notes onto scrap paper while the boys played in the front yard. I wrote and wrote until I was sure I’d captured enough to allow me to write my article properly later on.

Now, I may be wrong but this suggested to me that I hadn’t been able to think before because I'd simply had it too easy. I’d had the luxury of solitude, silence, and hours and hours in which to stare out the window. As soon as my sleepy, meandering, half-baked thoughts realised they had to fight for their space they did so. Maybe they were itching for a challenge or a reason to rise up with ferocity.

Obviously, one can’t write with an exuberant child chattering in their ear. For writing you do need solitude, silence and time. So I didn’t begin working from my car notes until Edward was safely back in his own home, where I now know he lives with an unspeakably patient family. But to kickstart my thinking, to wake me up, and help the adrenalin to flow I really needed Edward today. Perhaps I’ll invite him around next week too.

Am I Making Myself Sick?

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:06:28 -0400

My doctor called me a few days ago, and while it wasn't with news that I was going to die, it wasn't great.

He'd received the results from my blood test, a follow-up to a similar 'check all vitamins and minerals' test about ten months ago. I'd asked for that first test because I've been a vegetarian for 26 years and thought it might be worth a once-over. I felt pretty rundown, and knew that over the years I'd probably done too little exercise, taken on too many energy-sapping jobs, and had gone through two pregnancies, two bouts of breastfeeding, a divorce and a fair bit of stress, all meat-free.

Suffice to say, doctors don't initiate calls when things are going well. My iron, zinc and magnesium were lower than they were last time. My vitamin D levels were dangerously low. My doctor sternly told me I needed to get a handle on this. I told him I'd been taking vitamins almost daily. In fact, for a good three months I had taken them daily along with tonics supplied by a naturopath and had been convinced I was on the road to robust good health. Evidently not.

So I put down the phone and wept. I know what these deficiencies do. I know I'm very tired and often struggle to get through the day (iron), making it hard for me to do my job, care for my children and stay on top of all the other stuff of life. I know I am prone to catching whatever ailment people around me have (zinc). I know what's causing my swinging appetite and fatigue (magnesium). And I know that vitamin D deficiency is serious because lately I seem to hear about it on the radio every day. I know it's often a deficiency shown in patients who have cancer, MS, and depression. It's enough to make you weep for days...and then wonder whether your emotions are real or the result of a random vitamin which one would think was common as muck since it comes from the sun for god's sake!

Can it be that my no smoking, no drugs, light drinking, fresh food yadda yadda vegetarian diet is bad for me?

The crappest thing about this is that I honestly thought I was 'handling' it. I thought I was boringly healthy. I see a naturopath, swallow all the goop she gives me, go out into the sunshine, eat tofu/tempeh/beans and take vitamins when I remember. But it's not enough, evidently, and his phone call, which also included the words 'serious', 'immediately' and 'every single day' brought up a whole lot of unpleasant issues for me.

I don't want to eat meat at all, ever. I eat fish every now and then, having reintroduced it to my diet some years back, under duress (breastfeeding second time and chronically exhausted) and knowing how hypocritical it is since, no matter how smelly or stupid, fish are living things. And I don't want to eat living things. Now, both naturopath and doctor tell me I should eat fish three times a week - or more! - or I'm going to get very sick.

I've long wondered if my diet had some connection to my insomnia - and believe me, I'm aware of what a whining hypocondriac I'm sounding like right now - and I think it might. A lot of the women I know who are vegetarian suffer from sleep disorders. My doctor tells me there's no link but I'm not convinced. Especially knowing I'm not giving my body a lot of what it needs to function well in other areas.

But If I have to choose between being tired and weepy and keeping true to what I believe, I'm opting for an ethical life. I'm not being perverse - I just don't think I could face myself if I decided to fang into a T-bone so that I had more pep in my step, or so that I could make it to the top of the steps...

Starting yesterday, I have a daily schedule for my pill-taking. No more half-assed occasional vitamin taking; I'm treating them as essential. I'm acting like a drug addict or some crazed evangelical health nut. And I've marked a date, three months from now, for another blood test. It better be better.

The Lost City of Z

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:06:46 -0400

This is a review of The Lost City of Z that I've written for ABC Radio National's Book Show. I thought some of you might enjoy this book. It's honestly fascinating.

In April 1925 explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett set off into the Amazon jungle, highly skilled but ill-equipped, all stiff upper lip and unwavering purpose, determined to locate a legendary city of gold. This wasn’t the first time Fawcett had hacked his way through the jungle but this time he had his 21-year-old son Jack and the boy’s strapping friend Raleigh with him. They never returned.

Stories of Fawcett’s adventures filled the newspapers in his day, and he has inspired radio plays, novels, and documentaries, but for some reason he is not as famous now as Earnest Shackleton or David Livingstone.

American writer David Grann stumbled across Fawcett’s name while researching a story for the New Yorker, and was captivated. Grann’s new book, a biography and adventure story titled The Lost City of Z, may go some way to putting Fawcett back in the spotlight.

Grann is an unlikely author for this tale: an urbane, self-deprecating, widely published Manhattan resident, he’s a novice when it comes to jungle exploration. Hats off to him though – he not only tells a thrilling, meticulously researched yarn, painting a clear picture of a land where men were felled by yellow fever, disease-spreading insects, skin-eating maggots, snakes, and poisoned spears, he also makes his own journey into the Amazon. Grann’s enthusiasm for his topic is palpable, and it’s hard not to feel enthralled with his telling of Fawcett’s adventures.

Remember, this was a time when maps showed dragons for areas uncharted, when there was no Google, GPS, lightweight tents or effective insect repellent. Exploring the Amazon was gruelling and many of Fawcett’s companions died on the track. The jungle is vast and the river that cuts through it all is, as Grann says, the mightiest in the world, ‘mightier than the Nile and the Ganges, mightier than the Mississippi and all the rivers in China.’

Part of Fawcett’s legendary status came from his near inhuman resistance to disease and physical hardship. Fawcett was lean, tough and ascetic. He had no sympathy for those who succumbed to illness or displayed unmanliness, describing one companion who struggled as a ‘pink-eyed weakling’.

Studies at the Royal Geographic Society had taught Fawcett tricks to cope with ‘the horrors of thirst and starvation’, how to deal with savages, and how to treat a wound with hot grease. He ventured into the wilds armed with tea, sardines, rifles, opium, and a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Explorer’.

One wonders why Fawcett felt compelled to repeatedly enter a place he describes as ‘green hell’. What drove him to leave his family in search of a city that may never have existed? Was he proving himself to his parents? Was he inspired by his brother Edward’s popular novels, one of which featured an archaeologist called Arthur Manners who comes to trouble while searching Arabia for the ruins of the Oasis of Gazelles?

Some answers are offered by Fawcett in his diaries and log books. In one, he says that while he while he yearned to ‘be just ‘ordinary’’, that never lasted for long. He was called by ‘the voice of the wild places’. He says: ‘Inexplicably – amazingly – I knew I loved that hell. Its fiendish grasp had captured me’. Time and again he fled the ‘prison gate slowly but surely shutting me in’.

Grann says: ‘Part of him, like many of the great Victorian explorers, was fleeing the constraints of British society. Part of him was driven by scientific curiosity and his own demons. But I do think, at heart, he was a romantic who saw himself as an almost mythic figure embarking on an epic quest.’

Should you think, as I did initially, that this is a tale entirely relegated to the past, think again. You’d imagine that nowadays there is no part of the world unexplored, yet the Brazilian government says there are still tribes in the Amazon who have never had contact with outsiders. While we have destroyed some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of jungle in the past four decades – an area the size of France – there are still people living there who are unaware of our existence.

The Lost City of Z is a corker of an adventure story, and a movie in the making – the book is being developed into a screenplay by Brad Pitt’s production company. It might turn out to be a fabulous movie, but I’d strongly recommend you read the book before we find out.

Poor people at the pool

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:03:49 -0400

I live in Melbourne, Australia, with my partner and two sons. One week this summer, when the weather was relentlessly hot, my family and I spent Monday to Thursday at our local public pool. This was no hardship – our house is an oven on scorching summer days and we all love to be in and around water. Each morning we’d pack our rainbow of towels, still-wet bathers, sunscreen, hats, blow-up floaty things and thousand other necessities, throw them into the back of our sedan and chatter happily about the day ahead.

On every outing I found new and, I thought, engaging ways to complain about the lack of parking, while my children talked over and around me, refusing to allow their bright moods to be dampened by adult trivialities. Once I’d found a place to park (never more than a two-minute walk from the pool), we’d tumble out of the car, and schlep our belongings to a spot near the shallow end, under the trees, where we set up base camp.

The pool we frequent is lined on one side by large old elms that offer generous amounts of dappled shade. The change rooms are large, clean and bright. The café makes good coffee and great sandwiches. My older son often spots schoolmates and disappears with them to the deep end; the younger one often spies his friends too. Sometimes the parents would join their towels up with ours till we made a damp colourful patchwork around the tree trunk. Other times I’d steal a moment to read, with the sounds of squealing children, laughing adults and the slap of thongs on wet concrete in the background.

Most of the time it felt like an aquatic idyll: we would loll together and look up at leaves, making our way to the water’s edge at irregular intervals, and I would casually agree to things I’d normally veto - like icy poles at ten in the morning. The whole family seemed relaxed and happy.

But there’s an undercurrent at our public pool, as there is anywhere humans gather. It seems we can’t help but compete and compare, despite the fact there is nothing to gain. From Monday to Thursday this took a variety of benign forms. On Friday it did not.

Early in the week, when a friend and I were standing rib-deep in the water, watching our sugared-up toddlers throw themselves off the edge of the pool, she asked if I’d ventured up to the deep end. I admitted I had not, because the child who was once again launching himself at my head was best kept in the shallows and the other child preferred to be watched from afar, half-dressed mothers being embarrassing at best. It’s a different world up there, she said, and offered to free me for a moment so I could see for myself.

She was right. There’s a voluntary apartheid at the pool that I’d been unaware of – down one end you’ll find families, surface detritus of kickboards and balls, slightly warmer water, women in one-piece bathers, toddlers dressed in pool hijab; at the other end, people are tanned and buff, sunbaking, sporting ipods, with not a hat or maillot in sight. The girls at the deep end of the pool wore barely-there bikinis that they adjusted often to ensure no scrap of skin was left untouched by the sun. I watched as they alternated between looks of uncensored disdain when men stared longingly at them and cat-like huffiness when they did not. I’m not saying they should like or dislike being ogled, by the way. But given that many of them were wearing little more than they’d been born in, it did seem understandable that people would look.

Women of all ages sized up one another – and themselves - as they crossed paths. Mothers tisked at other’s parenting or lack thereof. Kids challenged each other to jump further, swim faster, and throw harder. However, I don’t think there was nothing going on that day that lessened anybody’s fun.

On Friday, though, I saw staring become malevolent. At a girlfriend’s behest, we went to an indoor mega-pool I usually avoid because it can be crowded, noisy and hot. Despite my grumbled misgivings, our children had a great time. They didn’t care that to get to the water we walked across slimy crisp packets, squashed chips and blood-spotted bandaids. Nor did they find it strange that we were swimming in a pool with a gazillion others, being lifted by fake waves in a building five minutes away from a beach. When they’d exhausted themselves, the kids bayed for hot chips.

While we perched on plastic chairs with our towels draped across our shoulders, eating, a woman walked towards us. As she approached, heads turned in unison to stare at her, like a field of flowers following the sun. But they weren’t looking at her admiringly. Boys elbowed each other, gawped and pointed, loudly saying ‘look at it’ and various ridiculous obscenities. Gangs of girls in expensive bikinis whispered, giggled, and wrinkled their clear-skinned faces.

The woman was fat and very tall. She was dressed head to toe in black. Her long hair was bleached yellow-white with a wide dark centre part. The hem of her tracksuit pants was frayed and trailed behind her. She wore what looked like a man’s t-shirt. Her flipper-sized runners sprayed water as they hit the ground. She walked in front of her wiry, goateed husband and three young children and stared straight ahead, chin up, silent. She knew we were watching her. How could she not?

She sat down not far from me and helped her family prepare themselves for a swim, paying particular attention to the youngest of the group, a little girl who was still mastering walking. My son asked me if she was a giant. I told him it was hard to tell if someone was a giant without talking to them first.

The woman was sweating – it was pushing forty degrees outside and felt like more inside – but she didn’t peel off her runners to even dip a toe. She watched her children play under the water fountains in the junior pool. Her face was impassive, or at least unwavering, her gaze did not wander. Her energetic husband wove among their brood, loudly chastising the children if they ventured too far out of reach or misbehaved in any way. He glanced at his wife sporadically to make sure she saw he was exerting a firm hand, perhaps to make her feel they were being looked after while she was benched.

For most mothers, moments like this are golden. It’s a joy to be temporarily free of responsibility, able to relax and take in the surrounds. But it seemed this woman had broken so many of the unspoken rules of the pool there was no way she was going to be allowed any peace. She was stared at like a zoo animal, or a bear in a Russian circus. She was big, she was dressed, she was dressed incorrectly, her hair was wrong, and she was dry. Those things combined would undoubtedly earn her stares on any day at the pool but she copped a whole lot more than a passing glance or two. There were plenty of overweight people there that day, lots of bathers wearing black, grandparents fully clothed, and loads of tall and small. But none of them was so clearly displaying their lack of wealth. And I think that, more than anything, was what caused her to be the object of such open derision.

There were top notes of excitement and glee around us but it suddenly seemed to me that the place was rather dark and nasty. I looked around with a keener eye. Kids were hitting and pushing one another, glossy-haired girls were standing in possies staring at boys who rated their hotness or otherwise, parents lining up for the waterslide looked edgy about the possibility of not being allowed on in the right order, I overheard one lifeguard ask another why people are so fucking stupid. It was a jungle.

Assuming I’d read the signs correctly, this woman and her family had very little money, so this trip to the pool would’ve been a treat, one that we, collectively, had made markedly unpleasant for her. Perhaps some people would say that being on the receiving end of this much attention was her choice, since she decided to come to the pool dressed like this. But I’d suggest people who think that have cupboards full of options and may have forgotten not everyone does. And they may or may not believe that the business of buying clothes, bathers and shoes – even inexpensive ones - can be more soul-destroying than going without. I wanted to say something to her but there was nothing I could think of that wasn’t patronising or designed only to make me feel virtuous. Anyway, I’d been as guilty of staring as anyone else.

I could blame the heat. I could say that the sheer volume of people meant all variations of good and bad behaviour would make a showing. I could think it’d simply been a case of a lack of manners. I could assume my sleepless night made me look at the world through black eyes that day. But I’ve sat with this memory and think that something else, deep and unpleasant, showed itself that day.

We’ve somehow convinced ourselves, even in a time of recession, that if people are struggling they’re just not trying hard enough. We seem to have further narrowed the already small range of acceptable ways to live, think and look, so that those among us who are blatantly poor annoy us, and make us uncomfortable. I hope this is only the legacy of the last budget-focused, conservative, tirelessly pragmatic government we’ve now shaken off because if that’s the case it’s fixable.

Not all of us need to change of course. As is always the case, the loudest and rudest made themselves felt while others did not. Not everybody stared. Not everybody judged. As we were gathering up our sodden belongings, I watched the woman’s husband shepherd their kids towards the seats. When they got there, he bent down, gave his wife a kiss and said ‘kids are loving it’. Nothing at all changed around them, but she smiled.

Why newspapers are now dead to me

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:03:07 -0400

Newspapers have been important in my life so it's been a heavy and significant decision to stop buying them.

As a child and teenager, I lived with parents for whom reading the daily paper was as much a part of the morning routine as black coffee, short showers, and yelling down the hallway 'If you're not in the car in five minutes I'm leaving without you.' I grew up with news on the radio, news on the television, talk of the daily news all around me. But the key source of information was the daily paper. I knew the names of the journalists my parents respected; I knew which papers, here and overseas, were considered the most credible.

My parents were political creatures, so I followed suit. When I moved into my first sharehouse we had the paper delivered. When I lived overseas I found places where I could buy my hometown paper, so that I could read that and the local broadsheet. For a short while, I harboured an ambition to be a serious journalist - a war correspondent or political reporter.

But no more. Newspapers are failing me and I'm walking away. I'm tired of seeing syndicated articles in the paper that I've read on the web up to two weeks prior. I find this unbelievably insulting - almost everyone in the First World has access to a computer at home, work or school, so why do they pretend to be doing us a service by reprinting something widely accessible (for free) weeks after it was published? This is not being part of the global cultural conversation - it's lazy and cheap.

I'm tired of out-of-date news - I know this is a fault of the medium, not the journalists or publishers, but I turn on the radio or my computer and hear about things minutes after they've happened, not the next day or so.

I'm tired of lifestyle articles, and I say this as someone who used to feed them into the machine. I don't want to write that fodder for newspapers any more because I think people don't want to read that any more - not in newspapers. Newspapers used to be about news and sport. Sure, I treasured the colour cartoon section and know my father used the classifieds to buy cars, lawnmowers, secondhand you-name-it. And I know that newspapers used to be the place we all turned to when looking for a job or a place to live. But mostly, newspapers offered news, services, information.

Now, my city broadsheet, The Age, offers up articles about fashion, celebrities, wannabe celebrities, restaurants, recipes, dieting, pets, shopping, house and garden advice, endless first-person columns that really should be in blogs, endless lists for the short-of-attention, interviews with people who have something to promote, photos of people's weddings, and gossip. I respect that gossip columns have always been in papers of note, by the way, but I agree with the recently retired Liz Smith that nowadays such columns are filled with the children of famous people and the copy not vetted by anybody.

The Age recently launched a new magazine lift-out called Sport and Style. The launch issue had a sports star in a suit on the cover. No, really! Two things that have never claimed to have anything to do with one another - David Beckam aside - are now the topic of a Monday glossy magazine. Mondays because no-one buys the paper on that day, and sport because they must feel they can use it to squeeze another dollar out of their advertisers.

Now, I should say that I love a lot of this stuff - I just don't want it in my newspaper. If I want to read about gardening (and I do read about gardening), I buy a magazine. If I want to read about fashion I go to Style.com. If I want to buy a puppy I google 'puppies' and read half a dozen of the gazillion articles on offer. I buy dozens of magazines a month, and piles of books. But I don't want this stuff in my newspaper!

So I read my news online. I listen to the radio. I have my favourite sources in both mediums and, in the case of my web news, they do tend to be what used to be the best broadsheets. I don't want the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Independent and Australian to cease to exist. I love that I know their sections, that I've followed certain journalists and columnists for decades. I love that I can pick and choose what to read. I love that they offer me news and opinion and analysis. And it has surprised me how little I miss the smell of the paper, the newsprint on my fingertips, the feel of the object... They haven't lost me as a reader, it's just that we've both changed.

There seems to be an enormous amount of talk about how newspapers will change, how they're rising to the challenges of the internet, how citizen journalists cannot replace paid professionals, how 'the model' has to change, but every month I hear of another venerated paper folding. Which, despite all I've said, does make me feel sad.

My partner tells me that the Guardian has come up with a new approach that will change everything - a version of syndicated articles with ads embedded. It will mean an end to the idea of an online newspaper replicating the print version, being instead a loosely connected, freefloating mass of articles from which the reader can pick and choose. I don't claim to understand it, but evidently we'll all know about it soon and it will be revolutionary. I almost felt myself clutch at the past for a moment when he told me this, then I let go. It's time for a change, and for some fresh consideration of the point of newspaper and the role of those who disseminate information in this age.

Unless I find myself alone and bored in a cafe, I won't ever read a printed newspaper again.