Saturday, June 07, 2008

Meme time

Elsewhere has tagged me for a meme, and it is no more than Good Manners to respond, and besides, nearly everyone whose blog I like has done this meme by now. So here goes, especially since the post about the Audreys concert last night has blown out into a three-volume novel and I'm still nowhere near finished. (And if anyone's reading this who doesn't like personal posts and doesn't understand enough about the blogosphere to 'get' memes, for God's sake leave now and don't drop any steaming piles of personal abuse in the comments box about things you don't understand. Thank you.)

It's revealing of the psyche of whoever originally wrote this meme that so much of it seems to be about food. Ah, food: my favourite.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Being enjoyably shellshocked in my first year of freedom after 18 years as an academic, my first year home in Adelaide thawing out after 18 years in Victoria, my first year of home ownership (bittersweet: nobody told me that houses eat money), and my first year of trying to scramble together enough of a portfolio of regular work to make a living as a freelance writer. Trying and failing to grow vegetables. Breaking in a new bloke. Spending a lot of time with my mother during what nobody knew would be the last year of her life.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

1. Chocolate Paddle Pops.

2. Haigh's dark chocolate truffles.

3. Chocolate cake.

4. Gelati: a 3-flavour coppa involving coffee, baci and chocolate.

5. Chocolate.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

6. Natural Confection dinosaurs and snakes.

7. Raw carrot sticks. (Really.)

8. Unsalted roasted almonds.

9. Mozzarella.

10. Macadamias. In this perfect world, not only does one not gain weight but one has unending supplies of cash ...

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire: (See what I did there?)

1. Give up working and write fiction.

2. Resolve my father's, sisters' and best mate's housing/mortgage issues.

3. Give vast sums to chosen charities, especially Médecins sans frontières, World Vision or similar, men's health centres and groups (anything dedicated to making blokes look after their health more carefully), and the RSPCA.

4. Buy a big house where we both could live* by the sea at Rapid Bay,


get a Border Collie and some chooks for it to round up, and take up snorkelling so I could watch the Leafy Sea Dragons


under the jetty.

5. Set up a fund for legal representation and other support for asylum seekers.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Senior Lecturer in literature.

2. Restaurant dishwasher.

3. Research assistant to an economist.

4. Labourer (really).

5. Girly singer and keyboard player in an otherwise testosterone-addled band.

Three of my habits:

1. Not putting my seatbelt on until I'm out on the road.

2. Singing in the garden.

3. Creasing and mashing the more exciting pages of books.

Five places I have lived:

1. Toorak, Melbourne

2. Curramulka, SA

3. Hawthorn, Adelaide

4. Klagenfurt, Austria (if a five-week summer-school residency at the U of Klagenfurt counts).

5. In streets called Alpha Street, Princess Street, and First Avenue. I think this is a worry.


No tagging from me. As Ampersand Duck would say, follow your dreams.


* Listen hard for the muted piano intro at the beginning of this and see if you can hear who it is. Like I didn't just give you a dirty great big hint.

18 comments:

Suse said...

Toorak? TOORAK?!!

Well that puts a whole new spin on things.

(Still maintaining your status as no.1 in the search engines for Haighs chocolates I see).

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

It was an accident, I swear.

(The Toorak address, that is, not the Haighs thingy. I plan to have a constant free supply before I'm done.)

Anonymous said...

What is it with this part of the meme?

"Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:"

Because FSM forbid that any woman could possibly actually admit to enjoying "fattening" food in the real world. In the real world, we must spend every waking moment avoiding "fattening" food, and when we don't avoid it, we must clobber ourselves over the head with guilt about it, and not enjoy it, not even for a second. We must constantly maintain that enjoying "fattening" food is a fantasy, not a reality.

Fuck that noise.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Well of course we must. Can't have us happy and free; that would never do. We might stop buying things and doing what we're told.

I don't know if you've ever experienced this, Lauredhel, but it's very common for a girl or woman foolhardy enough to be eating something, erm, robust in public -- and I mean in a cafe or on a park bench -- to have a total stranger, always male, stroll past or come up and say to her in a playful-uncle tone 'You really shouldn't be eating that.' Have, on a number of occasions, observed it; have, in my youth, experienced it.

And none of the victims were bigger than an Australian size 14, if that. Not that that should make any difference.

Philip said...

That photograph of the jetty at Rapid Bay almost made me cry.

Philip said...

...I suppose, on reflection, that being in Paris may have something to do with it.

GS said...

Perfect thing to do on a long weekend, couldn't resist the meme. Chocolate seems to be a theme in everyone that I have read!

Ampersand Duck said...

I'd be more interested in knowing what the name of your band was...

I was in an all-girl bluesy band called Fudge for a while, which said a lot about our sweet snacking abilities and whether we gave a toss about anything being fattening.

Anonymous said...

"I don't know if you've ever experienced this, Lauredhel, but it's very common for a girl or woman foolhardy enough to be eating something, erm, robust in public -- and I mean in a cafe or on a park bench -- to have a total stranger, always male, stroll past or come up and say to her in a playful-uncle tone 'You really shouldn't be eating that."

If you read Kate Harding's blog, you'll see plenty of first-hand experiences along these lines. Then there's the long shopping-trolley glances and glares, and the episodes where waiters, counter staff, and baristas decide for you that you want the "diet" version of whatever you ordered.

Ampersand Duck said...

Hey, you weren't in the Dugites, were you? ;)

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Oh, I wish! I was never anywhere near as skinny as that, although I did have better teeth, and I NEVER EVER wore blue eyeshadow.

No, they were WA, IIRC. We were never even remotely as good as them. We were a very local, very bad, very short-lived band, and I can't even remember what we were called. Something testosterone-charged, as I recall. The lead guitarist was a psychotic Russian called Vladimir who wanted to be called Wally and had taken a suspicious shine to my hopeless child husband.

Anonymous said...

philip, think I know what you mean.

We expect to be vulnerable to images of landscapes with large vertical amplitudes - mountains, valleys & so on. But in SA the horizontal amplitude matters. The sky, and the shape of the boundary between sky & land, matter most.

And the sense of time, of underlying strata laid bare. SA landscapes are a meditation on a geological time-scale incomprehensible on the eastern seaboard.

the feral abacus

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Philip, what was it, specific homesickness or just being too far away from the sea? I found Paris a bit squeamish-making in that respect.

Feral A, that is exactly right. All my sense of SA landscapes is of horizontal strata of quiet weird colours. (And my own best photo of Rapid Bay is out to sea: it's just a rectangle of solid blue, with an almost-indiscernible land/sea horizon). Even those big sphinx paws of land reaching out into the gulf from the Willunga escarpment make what's basically a horizontal movement, and the beautiful downhill drive from Angaston to Sedan is all about looking down onto the plain.

It's even the same in the city. I once picked up a friend at the Adelaide airport after she'd been living in Manhattan for several years, negotiating vertical landscapes of skyscrapers and the canyons that are New York streets, and she was totally weirded out by the dead-flatness of the drive north up Tapley's Hill Road to my place.

Philip said...

True about the horizontal, FA - after living for a couple of years on Seaview Road Henley Beach my eyes permanently adjusted to an expectation of the long view. Something about the tide, too, that taught me how to draw my eye properly across the landscape.

And it's this, I think, PC, that made the image jerk me: homesickness, yes, but also a deeper, primal desire for Space.

(On the local front, squeamish-making is the word.)

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Message to my bonkers stalker:

1) Has it occurred to you that perhaps it's you who has the problem and not the other commenters here, all of whom seem very (a) nice and (b) normal?

2) Hate comments will continue to be deleted without delay or apology.

Now FFS go away and stay away.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Also, (3): Which part of

"for God's sake leave now and don't drop any steaming piles of personal abuse in the comments box about things you don't understand. Thank you"

don't you understand?

Anonymous said...

Ah yes, the Sedan Road, where the journey is of rather greater consequence than the destination. And all those wonderful drystone walls draped across the eastern flanks of the ranges.

An old favourite - I drive my mother out that way whenever I'm in town.

the feral abacus