Starting over and selfish rambling
It feels like I'm starting Live Journal all over again, despite some friendly people still being on here from years ago (hello kineticfactory, bethiacathrain, malo23, hazeyjayne and mysterbey!) I thought I'd post this list of factoids about my life. It seems somehow more meaningful here than in Facebook. Feel free to ignore it completely.
1. As a young child I would encourage my male friends to wear dresses and choreograph dance routines to what is, in retrospect, by far the worst ABBA album but was, until the age of 6, my favourite record: 'Super Trouper'. I only say this now so as to disarm my mother who gets uncommon pleasure from telling this story to friends.
2. My first crush, aged 3, was on my neighbour Olivia Dombrovskis. Even then she had this grace about her other kids in the sandpit just didn't have. She had such an exotic name. The sand wouldn't hide in the cuffs of her jeans and get in her eyes when we did somersaults, her nose was never running and she didn't cry or have an annoying cutesie voice like some of the other girls. In fact, I don't think I heard her speak at all. She just lived in the big tudor house you reached by taking a long, winding path through the trees that looked like it was from an Enid Blyton book and was a total enigma.
3. I'm still searching for the first girl who ever kissed me. Leonie Eaton. I may, in fact, have invented her along with several talk show hosts who were fascinated by me and everything I thought at the time.
4. I 'studied' the violin until I was 5. No one in my family is musical but the soundtrack of my childhood is made up of trips to the orchestra instigated by my father in a desperate effort to counter the cultural disenfranchisement brought on by raising a child in Hobart, cassettes of 'Tapestry' by Carole King and 'The Best of Rod Stewert' played by my mother, the TV show Countdown and inane pop songs written by myself over a primitive form of beatboxing that only I could hear.
5. I would regale my unfortunate sister with these songs which had song titles like 'Do You Wear Your Ugg Boots In Bed?', 'There's A Car in The Way' and 'Big Leather Jacket'. Much of these songs were nonsensical because I didn't understand a lot of lyrics in pop songs, they just seemed to be syllables that rhymed so I thought it was OK to passionately sing lyrics like 'Apple-y basket so sure entalls' because it rhymed with 'Saturday market people and stalls" and was sure I'd be the first 12-year old to ever write and produce their own number one hit.
6. By 11 I had developed a fixation with the USA, one that exhausted my father's patience within weeks but which carried on for years; "why not France?" he would urge. Because the world was such a dazzlingly huge place - especially from Hobart - and geography allowed it to be compartmentalised, I became obsessed with how a country could divide itself into 50 states and how the then influential World Book Encyclopedia would lavish attention on the state slogans, state bird and state tree.
Soon enough I'd memorised the states, their capitals, in order of population and size. In retrospect my friends handled this surprisingly well. "Want to play soccer?" "No, I'm going to the library to read about Utah."
7. Being informed early on that there were really no jobs for anyone who knows the words to late-period ABBA songs or can recite the 50 American states in alphabetical order in under 30 seconds I decided I wanted to have any job that would let me catch planes. I'd be a travel agent. At three points in my life I have tried to become a travel agent convinced that my passion for traveling, the thrill of airports and exploring other cultures would convince those sitting opposite me to go to the Outer Hebrides instead of Ibiza, but been turned down each time because of my inability to 'sell'.
8. Aged 6, along with hundreds of other children, I lined up along the front of Parliament House in Hobart see the Queen. For some reason she zeroed in on me, asked me my name and which school I went to 'Fern Tree Kindergarten' I replied 'That's nice' she said and moved on. I'd like to say I left off 'Your majesty' in some literally infantile anti-monarchical statement, but I was just nervous.
9. The first band I formed, Diamond Dust, with Kelly Pettit, Alex Tassell, Joel Stibbard and Tracey Fisher was awesome. Morphing into Society's Outcasts one of the greatest moments of my life is, along with Joel Stibbard, Tracey Fisher and Kristy Anderson, winning the 1991 Taroona High Battle Of The Bands. The ensuing minor-level stardom and respite from low self-esteem that having grade 7's chanting your name as you walk down the school corridor can give is no small thing at 14. Still now I measure songs by 'would that have sounded good being played to the school at the Battle?'
10. I grew up in the best place I have ever seen for raising children. Fern Tree. It's so good it doesn't even exist anymore. A dozen or so families, all first-generation English, all with kids around the same age going to school together, having summer holidays together, forming the Fern Tree Gang and generally being adventurous and given free reign over the side of a forested mountain is one of the coolest and rarest gifts possible. I still adore the memories of growing up there, as, I think does everyone else who I grew up with. Plus, despite no one being a hippy, on election day the Fern Tree Kindergarten polling booth polls the highest Green vote of any polling booth in the country. Or at least it used to. It's quite different now.
1. As a young child I would encourage my male friends to wear dresses and choreograph dance routines to what is, in retrospect, by far the worst ABBA album but was, until the age of 6, my favourite record: 'Super Trouper'. I only say this now so as to disarm my mother who gets uncommon pleasure from telling this story to friends.
2. My first crush, aged 3, was on my neighbour Olivia Dombrovskis. Even then she had this grace about her other kids in the sandpit just didn't have. She had such an exotic name. The sand wouldn't hide in the cuffs of her jeans and get in her eyes when we did somersaults, her nose was never running and she didn't cry or have an annoying cutesie voice like some of the other girls. In fact, I don't think I heard her speak at all. She just lived in the big tudor house you reached by taking a long, winding path through the trees that looked like it was from an Enid Blyton book and was a total enigma.
3. I'm still searching for the first girl who ever kissed me. Leonie Eaton. I may, in fact, have invented her along with several talk show hosts who were fascinated by me and everything I thought at the time.
4. I 'studied' the violin until I was 5. No one in my family is musical but the soundtrack of my childhood is made up of trips to the orchestra instigated by my father in a desperate effort to counter the cultural disenfranchisement brought on by raising a child in Hobart, cassettes of 'Tapestry' by Carole King and 'The Best of Rod Stewert' played by my mother, the TV show Countdown and inane pop songs written by myself over a primitive form of beatboxing that only I could hear.
5. I would regale my unfortunate sister with these songs which had song titles like 'Do You Wear Your Ugg Boots In Bed?', 'There's A Car in The Way' and 'Big Leather Jacket'. Much of these songs were nonsensical because I didn't understand a lot of lyrics in pop songs, they just seemed to be syllables that rhymed so I thought it was OK to passionately sing lyrics like 'Apple-y basket so sure entalls' because it rhymed with 'Saturday market people and stalls" and was sure I'd be the first 12-year old to ever write and produce their own number one hit.
6. By 11 I had developed a fixation with the USA, one that exhausted my father's patience within weeks but which carried on for years; "why not France?" he would urge. Because the world was such a dazzlingly huge place - especially from Hobart - and geography allowed it to be compartmentalised, I became obsessed with how a country could divide itself into 50 states and how the then influential World Book Encyclopedia would lavish attention on the state slogans, state bird and state tree.
Soon enough I'd memorised the states, their capitals, in order of population and size. In retrospect my friends handled this surprisingly well. "Want to play soccer?" "No, I'm going to the library to read about Utah."
7. Being informed early on that there were really no jobs for anyone who knows the words to late-period ABBA songs or can recite the 50 American states in alphabetical order in under 30 seconds I decided I wanted to have any job that would let me catch planes. I'd be a travel agent. At three points in my life I have tried to become a travel agent convinced that my passion for traveling, the thrill of airports and exploring other cultures would convince those sitting opposite me to go to the Outer Hebrides instead of Ibiza, but been turned down each time because of my inability to 'sell'.
8. Aged 6, along with hundreds of other children, I lined up along the front of Parliament House in Hobart see the Queen. For some reason she zeroed in on me, asked me my name and which school I went to 'Fern Tree Kindergarten' I replied 'That's nice' she said and moved on. I'd like to say I left off 'Your majesty' in some literally infantile anti-monarchical statement, but I was just nervous.
9. The first band I formed, Diamond Dust, with Kelly Pettit, Alex Tassell, Joel Stibbard and Tracey Fisher was awesome. Morphing into Society's Outcasts one of the greatest moments of my life is, along with Joel Stibbard, Tracey Fisher and Kristy Anderson, winning the 1991 Taroona High Battle Of The Bands. The ensuing minor-level stardom and respite from low self-esteem that having grade 7's chanting your name as you walk down the school corridor can give is no small thing at 14. Still now I measure songs by 'would that have sounded good being played to the school at the Battle?'
10. I grew up in the best place I have ever seen for raising children. Fern Tree. It's so good it doesn't even exist anymore. A dozen or so families, all first-generation English, all with kids around the same age going to school together, having summer holidays together, forming the Fern Tree Gang and generally being adventurous and given free reign over the side of a forested mountain is one of the coolest and rarest gifts possible. I still adore the memories of growing up there, as, I think does everyone else who I grew up with. Plus, despite no one being a hippy, on election day the Fern Tree Kindergarten polling booth polls the highest Green vote of any polling booth in the country. Or at least it used to. It's quite different now.