This is something I wrote one night before I fell asleep. It’s not my life. It’s an amalgam of some of the women I know and have known and things they’ve (we’ve) felt. It was spawned, undoubtedly, by Portia De Rossi and her coming out of the anorexic kitchen (so to speak).
*
It was pitch black and all was quiet outside as she sat cross legged on the floor, in front of the open fridge. The little yellow interior light caste a long shadow that shuddered each time she jammed a fistful of cake into her wide open mouth. From the back, her arm moved from cake to mouth in quiet, methodical motion. From the front, the view was markedly different as she grabbed at the cake, with her hands, tearing it apart, digging into the rich, triple layer chocolate sponge. She had dark mud coloured sponge under her nails and the chocolate fudge icing stuck to her fingers. She didn’t care, she just wanted to shove as much cake into her mouth as possible, cramming it in, ramming it down her throat. All too soon, however, the family size cake was finished and she started desperately licking her hand, in a rapid feline motion, preening her hands free of dried fudge. She gnawed at her nails, plucking out the remnant chocolate with her teeth. Not satiated, she grabbed the plastic cake tray and lifted it to her mouth, where her teeth began tearing at the surface to remove all evidence of there ever being a cake.
Suddenly, she stopped and looked back into the empty fridge. Her eyes darted left to right as she calculated the calories she’d devoured and the weight she was about to gain. Her breath quickened with the short sharp bursts of air that started to wrack her small body. Moving to double breathes in half the time, her mouth suddenly swung open agape and distorted. Brown coloured crumbs hung, in limbo in the stalactite of saliva that hung from her lips as she began to sob. “No, no, no” she cried out, hands clasping tight around clumps of hair, tugging at the roots. She had devoured the whole cake in 10 minutes and eaten a week’s worth of calories.
Her name was Carmel. Like caramel, like the caramel colour of her skin and of her hair. She was beautiful, but couldn’t see it. She was funny, but couldn’t see it. She was already so thin but completely missed it.
“Okay, okay, calm blue ocean,” she huffed to herself. “So if I go to the gym for four hours tomorrow and eat only apples, this will be fine, right?” All while trying to work out how to fit in four hours of gym. “Oh god.”
She picked herself off the floor, slammed the fridge door shut and ran towards to the bathroom. Too much of a princess to even think of hanging her head in the toilet, she ran to the bathroom sink and stuck her fore and middle fingers down her throat, tickling her tonsils, until her stomach spasmodically started to heave. Her body convulsed with “bmmmmmlear” “bmmmlear” over and over, but nothing would come up. As her stomach started to ache with the almost unstoppable motion of being turned inside out from years of practice, tears streamed down her face and Carmel started to shake.
“Why, why, why can’t I even do this?” She slumped against the bathroom sink cabinets. And again started to cry. “Why you fat, ugly, fuck, can’t you stop eating?” The verbal flagellation she beat herself with was becoming too familiar and the words were starting to lose effect. He head in her hands, lump of disappointment and fear in her throat, she rubbed at her eyes with her palms, and kept rubbing until they were red and raw.
Empty of any more tears with a sore body from sitting on the cold tiles of her bathroom, she leant over to all fours and crawled her way past the scene of her crime, the kitchen, and back to her bed. She drew her sheets to her chest and closed her tired, red eyes. Exhausted from self hatred Carmel fell into a deep sleep and dreamt of being skinny.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The curious case of how to meet your baby.
I just want to mention that I have added a guest post on a beautiful young woman’s blog: http://www.cozshelikestoeat.com/blog/2010/11/malaysian-food-experience.html
about a Malaysian food experience we recently enjoyed while in KL. Please pop over and check it, and her blog, out – particularly if you want to devour her recent food experience of Greece!
*
We watch a lot of “How I met your mother”. It wasn’t a love at first viewing thing. In fact, it was only when some friends recommended the show by piling the entire series on DVD into our hands with enthusiastic faces did we sit down and dedicate any real time to the show. And it made us laugh, out loud.
LSH was even so bold as to say it was better than “Friends”. In some ways yes, the relationships seemed to have more depth. In others, no, because it wasn’t quite as funny and the characters weren’t exaggerated versions – to the point of caricature. I guess that’s what LSH liked about it so much.
The show is very clever in the way in a couple of ways. It uses flashbacks to excess, but in a fantastic and hilarious way. It also uses a continuing theme to tie multiple episodes, which are not necessarily obviously related, together. There’s one character, Marshall, who is allowed to punch his mate, Barney, five times – and every season there’s an episode dedicated to “the punch”. It’s exactly like a real friendship where the past is often brought up in moments of hilarity.
There’s also an obsession with doppelgangers. Marshall and Lilley, the married couple, have a pact that dictates when they see each of their friends’ doppelganger the universe is telling them to have a baby.
LSH and I have discovered we have a similar thing. While away on holiday I brought to LSH’s attention that some of the people who passed us on the street looked, to me, as if they were the Asian versions of some of the Caucasian people we know at home.
It’s a particular idiosyncrasy that when I look at someone an element of their face will often remind me of someone else. This is better than my friend who looks at people and sees animals. She’s forever telling me that such and such looks like a rat. Or such and such looks like a lizard. Personally, I prefer to tell people they look like movie stars.
For instance I have a friend who has the same lips as Angelina Jolie. Another who has Angelina’s eyes. I know someone who has Daniel Craig’s nose. It’s like Kym Valentine (Libby of Neighbours) reminds me of Cathy Freeman, I even think their accents are similar. LSH mainly humours these ideas, acknowledging only that I am slightly mental, but he certainly started to warm up to the Asian doppelganger idea. I pointed out a guy who looked like our friend’s husband, even a guy who looked like LSH’s boss. Suddenly he started getting into the groove and pointing out some of his own examples. Saying of that woman looks like your friend Susan, or that woman has hair like her friend Mary. Granted his examples were much more tenuous and inaccurate than mine…but he was getting the general idea.
It was then that we decided to steal from “How I met your mother.” We’ve been deliberating about a baby for a long time now. Do we? Don’t we? If we do, when? If we don’t, will we change our minds in a few years and it’ll be too late? But now we have a decision. When we see the Asian version of LSH and the Caucasian version of me, we know we should try to have a baby. Of course, we didn’t see the Asian version of LSH or the opposite version of me while on holiday and haven’t seen anyone even remotely close since. So, the universe is sending a message, loud and clear, that we shouldn’t have a baby yet. Message received universe. That solves that dilemma, quite nicely, doesn’t it?
about a Malaysian food experience we recently enjoyed while in KL. Please pop over and check it, and her blog, out – particularly if you want to devour her recent food experience of Greece!
*
We watch a lot of “How I met your mother”. It wasn’t a love at first viewing thing. In fact, it was only when some friends recommended the show by piling the entire series on DVD into our hands with enthusiastic faces did we sit down and dedicate any real time to the show. And it made us laugh, out loud.
LSH was even so bold as to say it was better than “Friends”. In some ways yes, the relationships seemed to have more depth. In others, no, because it wasn’t quite as funny and the characters weren’t exaggerated versions – to the point of caricature. I guess that’s what LSH liked about it so much.
The show is very clever in the way in a couple of ways. It uses flashbacks to excess, but in a fantastic and hilarious way. It also uses a continuing theme to tie multiple episodes, which are not necessarily obviously related, together. There’s one character, Marshall, who is allowed to punch his mate, Barney, five times – and every season there’s an episode dedicated to “the punch”. It’s exactly like a real friendship where the past is often brought up in moments of hilarity.
There’s also an obsession with doppelgangers. Marshall and Lilley, the married couple, have a pact that dictates when they see each of their friends’ doppelganger the universe is telling them to have a baby.
LSH and I have discovered we have a similar thing. While away on holiday I brought to LSH’s attention that some of the people who passed us on the street looked, to me, as if they were the Asian versions of some of the Caucasian people we know at home.
It’s a particular idiosyncrasy that when I look at someone an element of their face will often remind me of someone else. This is better than my friend who looks at people and sees animals. She’s forever telling me that such and such looks like a rat. Or such and such looks like a lizard. Personally, I prefer to tell people they look like movie stars.
For instance I have a friend who has the same lips as Angelina Jolie. Another who has Angelina’s eyes. I know someone who has Daniel Craig’s nose. It’s like Kym Valentine (Libby of Neighbours) reminds me of Cathy Freeman, I even think their accents are similar. LSH mainly humours these ideas, acknowledging only that I am slightly mental, but he certainly started to warm up to the Asian doppelganger idea. I pointed out a guy who looked like our friend’s husband, even a guy who looked like LSH’s boss. Suddenly he started getting into the groove and pointing out some of his own examples. Saying of that woman looks like your friend Susan, or that woman has hair like her friend Mary. Granted his examples were much more tenuous and inaccurate than mine…but he was getting the general idea.
It was then that we decided to steal from “How I met your mother.” We’ve been deliberating about a baby for a long time now. Do we? Don’t we? If we do, when? If we don’t, will we change our minds in a few years and it’ll be too late? But now we have a decision. When we see the Asian version of LSH and the Caucasian version of me, we know we should try to have a baby. Of course, we didn’t see the Asian version of LSH or the opposite version of me while on holiday and haven’t seen anyone even remotely close since. So, the universe is sending a message, loud and clear, that we shouldn’t have a baby yet. Message received universe. That solves that dilemma, quite nicely, doesn’t it?
Monday, November 1, 2010
This isn't toilet humour. There's nothing funny about this loo!
Without wanting to state the obvious, it’s been ages since my last post/confession.
So many reasons, but only one valid; we’ve been away in Singapore and Malaysia for an eight day whirlwind trip.
It was fantastic and much needed. I was practically tearing myself out of my skin before we left, really desperate to get out of my house, state and country and in need of seeing something different.
It might come as a surprise for some of you who know how much I hate flying that I managed to go anywhere. I hate it so much my whole body shakes before and during a flight. I do fly, of course. How else am I to see the world? So I bought a book about conquering the fear of flying and it helped. I no longer shake. I just feel sick and dry mouthed. So I sat nine days ago on a plane, dry mouthed ready to experience something else, touching wood the whole time that I would make it there alive and not make news as a passenger in Australia’s biggest air disaster.
We arrived early into Changi airport after seven hours of quite unnaturally, flying through the air, where I couldn’t use my phone or my keycard to get money out. Turns out my global roaming hadn’t been turned on and my keycard didn’t work either. My cousin was late picking us up, so I felt very much stranded. Thankfully LSH’s card worked in the machine and my cousin arrived 15 minutes (that felt like an hour) later.
The rest of the trip really went by in a blur. A blur of colour, taste, excellent food, deep, rich spicy smells, great shopping, dodgy side streets in KL, fear of dysentery again in KL and some of the scariest toilets I have ever been to in my entire life.
The toilet thing is really a thing. It’s a very traumatic experience visiting a scary loo. Particularly for a woman. I even took a photo of one of the “bathrooms” I visited while on a bus from Singapore to KL that housed Asian toilets. Asian toilets in general freak me out. They are porcelain holes in the floor, which a woman has to crouch over and pee into. As a kid in Singapore I was traumatised by this concept and refused to go. I strongly believed, and still do, that I might fall in to the hole in the floor. My thighs are useless at the best of times, let alone when it comes to something important like hovering above a hole in the floor. Even with months of yoga behind me as an adult, I couldn’t see how I could manage it.
So, in some places, like this place, there are only one or two European toilets. You know, the ones where you just sit and don’t have to squat. I say it but I even hate the word squat. I don’t like to say squat and in fact rarely do. I don’t like seeing people squat. I certainly don’t like to squat. I am entirely unsure why. A couple of years ago, mind you, I couldn’t bring myself to say nipple. I couldn’t even hear it without it making my teeth grind. I’m over it now, though. So perhaps squat is the new nipple. Just another idiosyncrasy to add to an ever growing pile of lunacy.
Anyway…I was in this “bathroom” in KL, and it was hideous. Dirt was on every inch of this room. Greasy cardboard lined the floors, the doors of the cubicle didn’t hang straight, and there was one European loo and it was all wet. Each cubicle is hosed down after each use, which kind of sounds great in theory, but the floors are always wet and I am a very suspicious person. There was a stench of waste that had been boiling in the 34 degree heat and it didn’t just waft by, it firmly rammed itself right up into the depths of my nostrils. It was all I could do not to gag. If my bladder wasn’t ready to burst and I wasn’t reminded of the American woman who held her pee for so long in a ‘Win a Wii’ radio competition that she died, I would have waited until the hotel in KL, another three and a half hours away.
Instead, I held my breath, tried to look kindly at the people in the queue and asked in some crazy broken English, which was really me speaking English with a Malaysian accent, about the tall toilets. “You know, the tall ones, big toilets, off the ground? Where is that one?” Thankfully the attendant hired to rinse the cubicles out, but clearly not clean the bathroom, knew my persnickety kind and pointed me in the general direction of a loo. I breathed a sigh of relief that is until I opened the door of the loo and saw a seatless porcelain bowl.
“FARK” was pretty much my first thought. I thought of the woman that died and thought of my kidneys and shut my eyes, tight, while I teetered over the loo and held my pants around my knees so they wouldn’t touch the wet floor, while on tip toes so the bottoms of my shoes wouldn’t have to touch the floors either. It was practically a acrobatic feat. Trauma over, I went back to the bus, where LSH gave me a look that said his experience was equally disturbing. I felt comforted by this. I always know that if LSH thinks the same as me, I am not doing what I do best, which is over-reacting.
I am always very aware of my behaviour in other countries. I don’t want to be the tourist that everyone complains about, like when you watch Amazing Race and there is always an annoying couple who wonders why no-one in China speaks English. I don’t think I am half of that couple as I am, in the main, open to new things when overseas and aware of everything being different/interesting. As one would expect the rest of the trip was more than marvelous and more than made up for the challenging latrines.
So many reasons, but only one valid; we’ve been away in Singapore and Malaysia for an eight day whirlwind trip.
It was fantastic and much needed. I was practically tearing myself out of my skin before we left, really desperate to get out of my house, state and country and in need of seeing something different.
It might come as a surprise for some of you who know how much I hate flying that I managed to go anywhere. I hate it so much my whole body shakes before and during a flight. I do fly, of course. How else am I to see the world? So I bought a book about conquering the fear of flying and it helped. I no longer shake. I just feel sick and dry mouthed. So I sat nine days ago on a plane, dry mouthed ready to experience something else, touching wood the whole time that I would make it there alive and not make news as a passenger in Australia’s biggest air disaster.
We arrived early into Changi airport after seven hours of quite unnaturally, flying through the air, where I couldn’t use my phone or my keycard to get money out. Turns out my global roaming hadn’t been turned on and my keycard didn’t work either. My cousin was late picking us up, so I felt very much stranded. Thankfully LSH’s card worked in the machine and my cousin arrived 15 minutes (that felt like an hour) later.
The rest of the trip really went by in a blur. A blur of colour, taste, excellent food, deep, rich spicy smells, great shopping, dodgy side streets in KL, fear of dysentery again in KL and some of the scariest toilets I have ever been to in my entire life.
The toilet thing is really a thing. It’s a very traumatic experience visiting a scary loo. Particularly for a woman. I even took a photo of one of the “bathrooms” I visited while on a bus from Singapore to KL that housed Asian toilets. Asian toilets in general freak me out. They are porcelain holes in the floor, which a woman has to crouch over and pee into. As a kid in Singapore I was traumatised by this concept and refused to go. I strongly believed, and still do, that I might fall in to the hole in the floor. My thighs are useless at the best of times, let alone when it comes to something important like hovering above a hole in the floor. Even with months of yoga behind me as an adult, I couldn’t see how I could manage it.
So, in some places, like this place, there are only one or two European toilets. You know, the ones where you just sit and don’t have to squat. I say it but I even hate the word squat. I don’t like to say squat and in fact rarely do. I don’t like seeing people squat. I certainly don’t like to squat. I am entirely unsure why. A couple of years ago, mind you, I couldn’t bring myself to say nipple. I couldn’t even hear it without it making my teeth grind. I’m over it now, though. So perhaps squat is the new nipple. Just another idiosyncrasy to add to an ever growing pile of lunacy.
Anyway…I was in this “bathroom” in KL, and it was hideous. Dirt was on every inch of this room. Greasy cardboard lined the floors, the doors of the cubicle didn’t hang straight, and there was one European loo and it was all wet. Each cubicle is hosed down after each use, which kind of sounds great in theory, but the floors are always wet and I am a very suspicious person. There was a stench of waste that had been boiling in the 34 degree heat and it didn’t just waft by, it firmly rammed itself right up into the depths of my nostrils. It was all I could do not to gag. If my bladder wasn’t ready to burst and I wasn’t reminded of the American woman who held her pee for so long in a ‘Win a Wii’ radio competition that she died, I would have waited until the hotel in KL, another three and a half hours away.
Instead, I held my breath, tried to look kindly at the people in the queue and asked in some crazy broken English, which was really me speaking English with a Malaysian accent, about the tall toilets. “You know, the tall ones, big toilets, off the ground? Where is that one?” Thankfully the attendant hired to rinse the cubicles out, but clearly not clean the bathroom, knew my persnickety kind and pointed me in the general direction of a loo. I breathed a sigh of relief that is until I opened the door of the loo and saw a seatless porcelain bowl.
“FARK” was pretty much my first thought. I thought of the woman that died and thought of my kidneys and shut my eyes, tight, while I teetered over the loo and held my pants around my knees so they wouldn’t touch the wet floor, while on tip toes so the bottoms of my shoes wouldn’t have to touch the floors either. It was practically a acrobatic feat. Trauma over, I went back to the bus, where LSH gave me a look that said his experience was equally disturbing. I felt comforted by this. I always know that if LSH thinks the same as me, I am not doing what I do best, which is over-reacting.
I am always very aware of my behaviour in other countries. I don’t want to be the tourist that everyone complains about, like when you watch Amazing Race and there is always an annoying couple who wonders why no-one in China speaks English. I don’t think I am half of that couple as I am, in the main, open to new things when overseas and aware of everything being different/interesting. As one would expect the rest of the trip was more than marvelous and more than made up for the challenging latrines.
So traumatic I took a photo.
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