Pure Morning.

Imagine, if you will, the sound of a song recorded to cassette from a crackly radio station, then played through speakers covered with stickers from TV Hits magazine. Imagine Brian Molko’s genderfucking lyrics being purred at a volume nearly high enough to compensate for the bad recording technique, the sound bouncing off the purple walls. No posters. Not after Mum discovered the centrefolds from Horse and Pony were taped up four thick, one over the other over the other, a poor découpage of mares, stallions and fluffy foals in green fields. I am at my desk, on a cramped chair, my ears as close to the speakers as is comfortable, mouthing along to lyrics that make my angst-wrapped teen soul believe someone out there knows me.

On the desk is a plain blue biro, a brown notebook, a cream-shaded table lamp, a metal pencil sharpener and the broken clip from a black fineliner I stole from my mother. Molko blares, the speakers crackle and I dig the slanted edge of the sharpener blade into the softest part of my thigh. The song peters out and I lean over to press the rewind button. I have rewinding down to a direct science, I know exactly how far to go on this tape to only listen to a few words of the DJ announcing the song before it starts.

Outside it is night but not dark. I am close enough to the city that on overcast nights the sky is lit with a dirty yellow-grey glow, making the clouds seem closer, heavier and full of menace. A white night where my mouth tastes like salt and metal, my head buzzes no matter how loud the music is and my restless feet tap out a frantic, discordant tattoo on the wheel covers of the desk chair. This room is not a sanctuary, this room is a cage.

There are voices in the hallway – my Mother will come in nine seconds to tell me to turn down the music, to go to bed. I slide all evidence of my crimes into the desk drawer where it rests among old homework assignments, quarter-written stories and the detritus of a fourteen year old with well-established hoarding tendencies. I needn’t bother – she speaks through the door. When I click the stop button, it jumps up with a click and the tape stops whirring. The stop button doesn’t say stop, it displays a tiny unicorn sticker meant for a toothbrush. The play button features a cat. I am suddenly disgusted at the things around me; china ornaments of horses and unicorns, the shaggy yellow dog with the glow-in-the-dark chest on my bed, the white melamine furniture, all overflowing with stuff, the purple paint sponged onto the walls. There is no space in here, there is no air to breathe.

From the bed, in the dark, I can’t see the glowing sky. There are stars on the ceiling and I trace imaginary constellations as I scratch, flaking the dry blood, getting into the wound underneath. The house is quickly quiet, even Lucy, the retriever, is asleep. The slate floors are cold in this house, so after everyone has gone to bed, you can hear her stand and click-click-click across the floor before she not-so-sneakily heaves herself onto the sofa bed.

Eleven pm. Midnight. One. Two.

I don’t have headphones, so the volume is low. Click, listen, rewind, repeat. I am staring at nothing; the blinds are closed and it’s dark and I can still feel the night pressing on me, weighting my lungs, pulling me down. I am not strong enough to bear this sky. The blade has slipped in between two sheets of maths equations.

Skin has layers – epidermis, dermis and hypodermis. I press the blade slowly through the dermis, listening for the pop of collagen and fibre, watching the skin retract, then well with blood. I am consumed with the inside of me, with escaping from the purple room, the white night; going deep into my blood and my bones. White fat makes me recoil – the hypodermis bleeds more freely, as the blood vessels aren’t constricted by tightly bound skin cells. With the blade out, the weight of my upper leg is enough to hold the wound closed. There are a few drops of blood, suspended by water tension in perfectly round balls on the carpet. I lie on the floor, half under the bed and gently pierce the top of each with a tissue corner – as if by magic, the blood climbs upward until not a trace is left behind.

We are all just chemistry.

better than before

Better than Before – Gretchen Rubin

better than before

This is the first book I’ve read by Gretchen Rubin and it came highly recommended by my friend Brianna of Extraordinary Days. I’ve heard of the Happiness Project and given most of this project is about changing my life by developing good habits (and ditching some bad ones), I thought it would be a perfect January read.

It took me over two weeks. I have NEVER been stuck on a book like that before.

It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the message, because I did – more about that in a second – but I just feel like me and Gretchen Rubin? We are not friends. She is not of my tribe. I don’t think I could spend time with her without becoming rubbed the wrong way.

But Shannon! It’s Gretchen! Everyone loves Gretchen! I hear people collectively exclaiming. Yes, and I can see why – she has a pragmatic approach to collating a good life that I think works really well, but oh goodness, she just comes across so rigid and overbearing in this book. Even when she’s questioning whether she’s being overbearing in the text, she puts it down to her personality type and continues on. It’s her way or the highway, buster! She believes in her research so much that alternate views or methods MUST be wrong. Her writing is banal and to a formula and it was a hard slog to get to the end of the book.

That said, her methods of approaching habits, both forming new ones and letting those that don’t serve fall away, is brilliant. She outlines the four main personality types that dictate how we form and follow habits (I’m a questioner, with a bit of rebel), but then goes even deeper, looking at how individual traits can help or hinder good habits. She forms a map for people to follow when looking at how habits work, an elegant and comprehensive framework that you can tailor to yourself.

Some of the traits that resonated with me are being a lark, an abstainer, a procrastinator and a sprinter. There is no point in me attempting to form a habit of getting up early and working on a project a little bit every day, while having only one caffeinated beverage – it’s simply setting myself up for a loss.  This is the joy of Rubin’s book – she doesn’t ever say that being one way is worse or better than another, it just is. And because it is and we are, shaping habits according to our traits and tendencies will work a lot better than just taking a one size fits all approach.

Please don’t let the fact that I can’t stand Rubin’s prose style put you off reading this book. It’s full of practical advice to help you succeed. I doubt I will read any others of her books, because I really don’t want to feel like reading is a chore, but undoubtedly she has developed a helpful approach that many, myself included, will resonate with.

Book Review: The Art of Eating In by Cathy Erway

The adventures of a girl who only eats home made food for two years while living in New York. It sounds so promising and the first chapter about the history of restaurants and how NY became the ‘eating out’ capital of world is amazing. Unfortunately after that, there is not enough cooking and a lot of ‘discovering oneself’ and honestly, reading a book filled with every day anecdotes about random people doesn’t interest me. When Cathy DOES talk about cooking (and I mean the nitty gritty of cooking, not just ingredient lists and recipes, I mean how you can juggle cooking dinner and desert at the same time and how you can add these leftovers to this meal to make it better and how bone in cooking creates more flavour) it’s really interesting and the writing flows along. But when she’s telling stories which involve several people you’re not sure if she has already introduced in the book or if they just appeared now and the timeline is a little fragmented (WHEN DID SHE PICK UP THE MEAT FROM THE BUTCHER? WHEN??) and the writing weaves knots that suddenly tighten and choke the story without actually getting anywhere.

Somehow I think this concept made a much better blog.

Anyway, the book cycles through Cathy’s initial romance with her boyfriend, their moving in together and eventual break up, followed by her quest for romance which doesn’t involve restaurant dinners. It also shows how hard it is to spend time out with friends and family without eating out. I found that the book gives a good list of things Cathy found hard, from avoiding vending machine snacks to finding the line between eating out and buying pre-prepared food. But the answers are rather enigmatic. This is either because I’m not good at reading between lines (I feel there should be no ‘hidden’ meaning in books. What’s the point in adding meaning if 60% of the readers aren’t going to pick up on it?) or because Cathy didn’t actually come up with any answers during her 2 year quest.

In the end, this book is a long slog which introduces the reader to some interesting concepts and theories, but doesn’t actually elaborate on much. Cathy explores dumpster diving, foraging and low waste eating, but doesn’t actually stick with any long enough to give a detailed analysis. Basically if you want a how to manual about not eating out or alternatives to eating out, this is not a good book. If you want a story about how an average girl spent two years figuring out her life while not eating out, then it is. I was expecting much more practical advice and was a little disappointed.

Book Review: This is not a drill by Paul Carter

I haven’t read Carter’s first book (Don’t tell mum I work on the rigs, she’s thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse – a title which always makes me wonder if he does actually know how to play piano), but that didn’t make my enjoyment of this sequel any less. Carter explodes into the book, immediately diving into the life or death situation that gives the book it’s name. From then until the very end the book is a whirlwind ride of dangerous and comical situations, crazy characters, giant crabs and excessive amounts of alcohol, love and heartbreak.

Carter flies around the word, from Russia to Japan to Afghanistan and back to Australia to see his long suffering girlfriend (now wife) Clare. He reconnects with his Dad and a few of his Dad’s war buddies over single malt scotch, barbecues toes during a storm, discovers the best way to sneak a ciggie on a non-smoking rig and nearly gets blown up researching mercenaries in the Middle East.

Carter’s writing is pretty damn eloquent, given that he’s been a self-professed rigrat for most of his adult life. Sure, there’s some very colourful phrases throughout, but on the whole, the style comes across like an editorial – well researched and factual, but still personal and emotive. Sometimes I found Carter gets a little verbose when he starts talking about causes and issues close to him, which doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the book, but forgive him that and this is a rollicking read which carries itself well into the early hours of the morning.

Review: The Butterfly Mosque by G Willow Wilson

The Butterfly Mosque is a memoir. It’s not an autobiography because it doesn’t run a perfect timeline. Willow (I think the G stands for Gwendolyn, but don’t quote me) jumps back and forth quite a bit between using ‘I remember when…’ and ‘I was doing…’ which for me, made the story more engaging. It’s also a bit of a travel narrative as Willow spends a year immersed in Muslim culture in Egypt. This is not a book about Islam. It has lots of references to Islam, Islamic writers and the Quran* and the main character does convert to Islam within the first few chapters of the book, but it’s still not a book about Islam. It is a book about Willow, the faith and culture she embraces and the many, many contradictions she sees while being an American girl married to an Egyptian in a Muslim country.

Willow heads to Egypt after college to spend a year teaching at an English language school in Cairo. Having secretly and somewhat uncomfortably, given her atheist background and the recent events of September 11, embraced Islam, Willow arrives in Egypt with little knowledge of the culture, but ready to embrace all that it entails . She meets Omar and finds herself falling in love with a man she has never even touched. Determined to stay in Egypt with Omar, Willow officially converts to Islam and marries him. Despite being welcomed into Omar’s family and free to worship the god she has chosen, Willow finds assimilation into Egyptian culture difficult. She slowly becomes more and more accepted in her community, but there are problems when she wants to travel the Middle East and even more difficulty when she wants to return home to the States.

This book is a loving recount of a young girl’s year in Egypt. Willow speaks of her hardships and her joys in gorgeous prose and writes observations about religion, culture and humanity that are wise beyond her years. My favourites include

‘With remarkable foresight, the chancellor of BU [Boston University] kept classes in session that day, becoming one of the first to argue that if we disrupted our way of life we would be helping the terrorists.’

‘This is the heart of the clash of civilisations: not the hatred of the Other, but the self-hatred produced by the Other. This is what makes hatred so easy to propagate, and so difficult to counter even for those who question it’s authenticity.’

‘It was such a tantalizing contradiction, being a woman in the Middle East – far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated. When people wonder why Arab women defend their culture, they focus on the way woman who don’t follow the rules are punished, and fail to consider the way women who do follow the rules are rewarded. When I finished an article or essay, all I got was an email from an editor saying, “thanks, got it.” When I cooked an iftar meal during Ramadan, a dozen tender voices blessed my hands.’

Doesn’t that last line just make your heart want to weep and sing at the same time? This book is challenging and engaging. It took me a long time to read and even longer to digest in order to write this review.** Read it if you are not Muslim in order to get a little bit of insight into a challenging and adoring world from the point of view of someone who is western born and educated (and therefore a little skeptical). Read it if you are Muslim for a sweet story of love and acceptance and of finding god when god was hard to find. Read it if you are atheist, change the capital g in god it a little g and you will still enjoy the story! But read it. Even if you don’t agree with everything that Willow says – I certainly didn’t, there were some very confronting parts to this book for me – you will still love the story and the writing is superb.

What have you read lately that made your heart sing? I’ve promised Richard that once I finish The Curse of the Mistwraith I’ll finally read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy***, but after that I’m wide open – give me something to read!

*There are like a bazillion ways to spell this word. Don’t bash me.

**Simple as it is.

***42 is now a running joke in our house.