I got a pair of runners four years ago, because they looked pretty cool on a chick in a Lorna Jane catalogue.  I did not try them on, nor did I get ‘assessed’ (yes, this is now a thing) by a manchild in a sports shop.  I just popped online, whacked in my PayPal deets, and voila, they arrived at my door.  So you see, even purchasing the exercise equipment can be done tres lazee (French* for bloody lazily).

The next step took me out of the actual house, and into the actual LJ.

Insert misty dream-sequence overlay:  

Oh Lorna, you really do know how to woo the forty-something, flabby female.  Stretchy singlets telling me to “Never Give Up” and “Eat More Crap Food” *, comfy pants with elastic waists for when I’m retaining nachos, you even have exercise bra-ish crop tops with breast augmentation, which is of paramount importance when exercising, I find.  Oh Lorna, your change-rooms are spacious and opulent and dimly lit, you make a lady feel like a certain kind of “lady” as I strip off each layer and replace it with spandex.  Oh Lorna, I can’t decide between so many of your items, that my brain goes kind of funny and I find myself at the checkout with a total of four hundred and twenty-seven dollars worth of potential sweat sponges.

WHAT???!!!

End of dream-mist

So I told the puzzled looking gym-nymph with the money-munching-machine that I had to “Go to the actual bank” and ran out of the store faster than the Lithglow Flash.  It seemed I didn’t need exercise gear after all, just a jolly good fright to get my legs moving and my chest heaving.  And that was without the crop-tits.

Four years on, and I haven’t been back to Lorna’s shop, in fact, I usually scurry quickly by, heart-rate up, face averted, lest the nymphette grab me and force that pile of comfort upon me.  Four years on, and those runners that looked great on the model, are still rubbish to walk in, let alone run.  They are microscopically more comfy than high heels, so I wear them as slippers, during the two cold months we have here on Coast.

This week something shocking and strange happened: I made the hasty resolution to get fit.

I decided to go to an actual shop, where I could be ridiculed served by shop assistants half my age and percentage body fat and get me some shoes that wouldn’t cause my shins to splint if I looked at them sideways.  The manchild who served me was lovely and helpful and went to great pains to measure me up (apparently people don’t know their own shoes sizes any more) and diagnose my walking pattern.  I told him I knew what it was: slow to non-existent, but he insisted on video proof.  He told me to “walk normally” on the thingy, and all I could think of was John Cleese’s silly walks, but I could only remember the Hitler one, so I did that.  He just looked at me deadpan and said, “Hmmm, I can’t confirm your heel-strike from that, can you do it again?”  I told him to piss off and just gimme some shoes.

So he did, three choices in fact, all of them ugly and bright and …wonderfully cloud-like.  I wasn’t allowed to have the pretty pair I really wanted, because apparently, I have a neutral gait.  I’d say that’s right, if by neutral he meant ambivalent to any gait at all, and definitely nothing faster than a light trot.

I have bought the fluorescent little foot pillows home, and put them on and off and on again at least seventeen times.  They look ridiculous, and by default, I look ridiculous wearing them.  I feel like the Mardi Gras version of Jerry Seinfeld, with them on the ends of my legs.  I do however l do seem fitter since purchasing them, so they have served their purpose.  They cost enough to feed most of the small nation from whence they were crafted, so they are sitting on a shelf, all of their own, staring at me, as I stare back.  They are trying to wear me down, and into wearing them.  Don’t tell them it’s only Autumn, and I don’t need new slippers just yet.

The pricey slippers

* This may or may not be true.

What do you think about runners?  What brand do you have?

Look

There is so much amazing in the world right now.

What a time to be alive.

And what a gift and a surprise it is to actually be alive.  That the glint in the eye of our parents and our parents’ parents (ad infinitum) coincided precisely with ovulation, desire for offspring, health and age, for us to even be conceived, let alone survive, and be wind up sitting here, devices at the ready, to read and type and post and tweet and like.

What a joy to be able to look out the window and see the frothy whitecaps, whipping over that big blue, all the way backbackback to the fuzzy horizontal line where two blues kiss.  To see so much sand that it looks to be one whole lemony-beige thing and not scattered grains, straining out to the points either end.  To see the goldeny-green of the cane sashaying forward and back at the breeze.

So many thing to marvel and wonder and be in awe of.  Cars that stop you from getting speeding fines by keeping their speed constant, and then park themselves.  Whole CD collections that you carry around in your pocket.  Slow cookers to gently coax your food to readiness all day whilst you sit by the pool, a pool that cleans itself of algae and leaves.  A vast information source that can tell you the weather, the age of that kid from the Henderson Kids and the recipe for donuts that you lost when you chucked out the donut-maker box six years ago.  A thingy to cool down your wine instantly and without a fridge (cos Lord knows you can’t wait).  Apps that allow you to make cat memes, so you can share pussy jokes with people you’ve never met, but call your friends.

So much room and light and air and breath around us.  Our skies are so high and so grand.  The spaces around us so generous, we never need to touch, should we so choose.

So much stuff, that each of our houses are full with it.  Stuff that seems to multiply at night and come wriggling out of cupboards and drawers with the morning light.  Entire lifetimes would not use all the stuff up.

What a strange, abundant, fast and marvellous time and place this is.  There is so much to gape at.  Mouths wide.  Eyes open.

If only we would share it.

I’m outing myself, right here, right now:

I love SYTYCD.

I love a lady who runs funny, dancing in her nightie to a bit of Lana.

I love pops and krumps and jumps and pumps.  (Or whatever you call them.)

I love genres and passion and chorey and chemistry and the journey.

I love that they think their lives will change.

I am a bit cross that Jason isn’t on any more.  Ahhh, Jason.  We were the perfect match, both of us a little bitchy, a little bossy, a little bit mouthy.  Until I found it was apparently unlikely that we would be betrothen.

Thanks to SYTYCD I now know everything about dance.  I can predict how the judges will judge.  I can tell when Carrie will cry.  In fact, I think I probably could go on the show myself by now, such is my turn-out and arm-styling.  I think there is a place for a new genre: 80s dance, replete with White Man’s Overbite.  And I’m a natural.

Before you mock me, let’s be completely honest: it is better than the Winter Olympics.   Quite frankly, I’ve had about all I can take of all that cold and the curling.  The curling was funny at first, but now?  Not so much.  However I would invite them over to sweepmop my floors.  We have white tiles, and one big hairy furball who sheds all the time, leaving a trail of grey hair all over the joint.  And we also have a cat.

So now you know.

Now you must excuse me, Graham Norton is about to start, the furball has absconded to another room to watch gold medal ice-hockey or some shit, and I have a secret Tim Tam stash to inhale whilst I practice my plies.

Do any of you even like the Winter Olympics?

And who will win SYTYCD?

I have twin brothers, younger than me, and identical.

When they were hanging around my Mother’s neck like teensy, chittering monkeys, we used to tell them apart by the number of freckles on their ears (One dot for Twin One and two dots for Twin Two).  In photographs Twin One was always on the left, Twin Two on the right, just in case we couldn’t tell who was who after they were printed on the Hanimex paper.  But I could always tell.  To me, they were and are different in so many ways.  Maybe because they are mine.

Back in those heady days of natural conception, twins were rare and strange.  And I suspect identical, tiny, olive-skinned, white-haired boys that flashed by you on bikes or skates or feet were unheard of.  They seemed like little tornados, in constant whirling motion, picking things up and flinging them off as they razed the landscape.  If you got too close you could be pulled into the vortex, and you’d think it was a lark, being close to The Twins and their energy, only to be spat out again.  Only The Twins could endure.  The landscape of Twinland had it’s very own postcode.  Visitors were just that.

So I was The Twin’s Sister.  I was, and still am, ‘Sissy’ to a whole generation of kids that now own homes, have children, have gone bald.  Kids who can now buy their own beer from the Torquay Pub, they no longer have to beg me, but they still call me Sissy.

The Twins grew up, and first Twin One and then Twin Two went to live and love in countries far away.  Countries filled with television and coke and fries and sport and sport and noise and hustle and opportunity and excess.

When Twin One left, my pericardium got a rip in it, but I thought it would heal, because I thought he would come back.  And just to be sure, I held Twin Two as tight as I could, as a lure, as bait.  I cleaved to him, for I knew that Twins such as these could not cleave.  Yet somehow they did.  Somehow that Twin One found the piece that fit, all the way over there, over amongst the loud.

It took Twin Two much longer to find his fit than I ever thought it would, and for that I am grateful.  But even in knowing he would one day go, I wasn’t prepared for how much it would hurt as that rip became a gash.  Perhaps there was scar tissue to come away.  Perhaps it was because I knew this was it.  Without bait or lure I couldn’t hope to snare them back across the Pacific.

They have found the partners, and the places that know them, and enrich them.

The have stepped into the lives that they were always meant to have.  And when you meet these women- who are alike in so many ways, not twins, but similar enough that perhaps they could kind of, almost be- when you see how they complement my twins, when you hear how they speak of them, when you notice that they love them in all the ways you would want your tiny little preemies to be loved, you know that what is preferred and what is right are not always the same thing.  That right is better.  And that now you have two sisters.  And that is even better still.

And then, miraculously, a little bit of that torn-up pericardium starts to itch.

And that means it is healing.

Did you ever meet someone so amazing, and such a good fit for your friend-finger that you knew right away you could slip them on, and then you’d be friends forever?

Did you ever have a person in your life who made you laugh so much that your face would get paralysed into a reverse Bell’s Palsy smile, and you would snort your drink out through your nose, again and then again?

Did you ever have a friend who knew all of the things about you so completely that they could predict what you should do, and they would know how to tell you so your soul could suck up the words better than a ShamWow?

Did you ever have a mate who sparkled so hard that she lit up every room she walked past, and you could just follow around in her afterglow, smiling?

Did you ever have a person who knew on a breath how to untangle your knots and smooth you out like Glad Wrap?

Did you ever have a friend who knew when you needed her to be funnyseriousrudesarcasticteasingsad?

Did you ever have your friend call you and tell you she was scared, so scared of the thing that the doctors were going to do to her, and that you knew you should fly, fly, fly to her and hold her and shield her with your wings and stop them from touching her with all of their stuff, but you didn’t?

Did you ever say a proper goodbye?

Generally speaking I don’t like nature to touch me.  I don’t go on long bushwalks.  I don’t like birds, insects or wildflowers.  I don’t care for ‘fresh air’.  Plants are okay I guess, but I don’t understand the crazy rules you all have about what constitutes a plant or a weed.  To me they are all plants, however many of you seem to have decided some of them are good and some are evil.  I have no idea why.

The only exception to my nature indifference is the beach.  I love the beach.  I love the feeling of crunchy white sand.  I love the smell-taste of salt and how it scratches my skin when it dries.  I even like the water, as long as it has been heated to the appropriate temperature.  However if I’m to be completely honest, my love for the beach could be tempered by a Pavlovian-type response that goes: Beach+Coconut Oil=Tan.  So perhaps I only like the beach because I’m vain.

Now back to the nature thing: I don’t like it much.  I’m happy for plants and trees and stuff to be over there, looking after themselves, but I don’t need them to get all close to me.

This weekend, nature could be avoided no longer.  Even my untrained eyes could see our joint looked a bit crap, so gardening had to be done.  So we made a plan with our neighbours, and we gardened the shit out of our plot.  We grabbed nature and we showed it who was boss.  Mostly.  Other than all the times that it showed us me who was boss.  Stabbing, scratching and hurting me in ways inhumane.  Here is the proof:

Exhibit One: hand maiming

Exhibit Two: Leg scratch

I know, I know, it’s terrible isn’t it?

No wonder certain politicians are against all nature and want to kill it with fire.  Nature is terrible and dangerous and it must be stopped.  Sharks and their bitey teeth and their cold, dead, untrustworthy eyes.  Coral reefs and their sharpey, prickly, stabby bits that scratch your feet when you walk on them.  And of course you’ve just seen what damage inert plants can inflict, left unrestrained.   Pfft, out with dangerous nature and in with air-conditioned comfort.

See for yourself how sane it looks in this picture (that I stole off the internet, but didn’t write down the source…Sorry clever cartoon maker, possibly Allie Brosh) :

Just sayin’