The American elections are over, the end of another piece of theatre which has held me in thrall for a number of weeks. McCain, arms windmilling, eyes popping, little engine whining against the ever-steepening gradient to victory. Obama, cool as a cucumber, bringing his hand down emphatically on the podium and swearing to change the world as we know it. It is so absorbing that I overcome my customary squeamishness and listen open-mouthed to the blame and hope and promises that fly through the air, faster and faster, a manic tornado of claim and counterclaim which is suddenly doused by the climactic election of the first black American president of all time.

According to the rules of Hollywood, the story ends here. Disadvantaged (but virtuous and intelligent) black man overcomes all odds to reach the pinnacle of success. Violins swell. The crowd goes wild. Tears well in the eyes of disadvantaged black man as he accepts their homage. The credits roll.

Reality, on the other hand, is an affront to our sense of narrative. The story is over. Good has prevailed. This is the problem with politics: the frenzied leadup to elections leaves everyone with a hangover.

At the theatre after some years of relying on the cinema for my visual stimulus, I am shocked by the three dimensional bodies of actors rotating and breathing in front of me. Cinema is a flat world swelled only by music, where everything you see is included for a reason, and body parts are amputated and blown up on the screen as ciphers of feeling. The camera zooms in on hands, twisting in nervousness or reaching for a gun or clasping one another in fear or desire or an attempt not to fall from the 25th floor. Eyes, lips, heaving breasts fill the field of vision as the violins howl. Each body part carries such a surfeit of meaning (apparently Hugh Jackman's beard had its own separate screen tests for Australia) that the sight of an entire organism could overwhelm the viewer completely. All that exists is the piece in the frame.

At the theatre, on the contrary, there they are, living human anatomies, the kneebone connected to the thighbone connected to the hipbone. Nothing is obscured, nothing is irrelevant. You can see their eyes and feet all at once; their fronts have backs, their tops have bottoms. The character is built slowly, in the thrust of a hip, the motion of a wrist, a shifty sideways glance. The bodies must only move as the person they are pretending to be, in a dance equal parts freedom and constraint.

At first I find them oddly unconvincing: they are too much on display, they cannot possibly be anything but themselves, clumsily faking another set of mannerisms, another life. But look what happens as the show proceeds: I am drawn in, slowly but completely, to this imaginary world, to the orbit of these three bodies. It is only a story, but a story lived in every muscle and sinew of the three men on stage, who must surely forget who they are for the duration of the show, who must surely cease to be who they are until they are recalled to themselves by the applause of the audience.

It is pure magic. The human body, unairbrushed, unmade up, unrepentantly flesh, is more lovely and more expressive in its entirety than it could ever be when decomposed on screen.

Enough about the crazy right, what about the crazy left? Politics in the (Irish) pub on Friday night, a talk about Iran and Palestine (War or Dialogue?). A quick perusal of the internet reveals a large amount of cyber-bile directed at the two speakers, one of whom sweats heavily and stumbles over his words, the other honey-tongued and welling with smooth private-school confidence. The crowd is what is really interesting- mostly over 50, and all deranged to various degrees. I have the impression that they are desperately seeking their 15 minutes of fame behind the microphone in question time. None of them actually asks a question, using up their allocated minute on establishing their credentials to be there in the first place. I am from Middle East, I am an academic who...., I have been to the middle east etc etc etc . There is a man in a beret (yes, a beret) seated at the back of the room who devotes himself to drinking and heckling in the time-honoured tradition of beret-wearers. There is bad feeling, resentments and general pettiness- more like a 2UE talkback session than a gathering of intellectuals, which is how they bill themselves. I feel simultaneously disappointed and vindicated: as with hippies, left wing intellectuals are no more virtuous than anyone else.

A long weekend of good feeling and alcohol in the City of Melbourne, reconstituting lost pieces of myself that reside in the memories of Marcelle and Brendan Renkin. The week starts with initial apprehension- Brendan and his friend Damien are in Sydney. There is old love and hurt feelings, and the possibility of awkwardness. For some reason this awkwardness doesn't materialise, as it sometimes does, in defensive sparring and mockery: we drive to Melbourne together in harmony, talking about Australian identity, about pedophilia, laughing at the contraband foodstuffs in the boot that Brendan's brother has acquired by questionable means and sent south to his numerous relatives. Marcin and Brendan talk about Russian politics. I watch them with proprietorial pride- such good boys, look how they get along. They turn out to have other things in common besides their romantic involvement with me. Look how modern, how mature we all are, driving towards Melbourne without discomfort or envy, discussing the nature of the universe and smiling at each other. As I write this I realise it sounds as though we are driving towards some horrible denoument, but we aren't. Things are simply alright.

In Melbourne there are shades of scores of other trips to stay with Marcelle. We giggle for days about nothing much, consume bottles and bottles of booze, dance and drink and eat. We lie in bed and talk to Marita and cuddle her daughter. We go to the shopping centre and buy cheap and hideous Australiana for Marcelle to distribute when she gets back to Panajachel. We finally have time for silence as well as constant jabber.

When we leave them on Sunday afternoon I succumb to a terrible feeling of loss which I have not felt since Marcin left me 5 years ago in Awasa. I pine (mainly for Marcelle- I have erected defenses against Brendan long ago) all the way to Albury. It takes several days after returning to Sydney for the good feeling to reassert itself, and I remember leaving them another time, nearly ten years ago when I came back to Australia. It was a definitive separation for me and Brendan, though I didn't really acknowledge it at the time. They drove me to the bus station in Manchester. It was a gritty, grey autumn day, eddies of wind blowing takeaway wrappers and empty plastic bottles around the benches. I kissed them goodbye as they stood there in the turbulent air, and instead of doom and impending loss I felt simply happy to know that somewhere in the world, the two of them existed. Toxic blues eliminated through the usual metabolic processes, I feel the same now.

I am spending this early part of Sunday morning finally learning something about the geography of the United States of America. I have managed to absorb all sorts of stereotypes and iconic landscapes (laconic Texans in sheriff's uniforms, fast talking New York cab drivers, ranchers, pioneers, cult leaders, Indians, snow-capped mountains, bayous, seas of prairie-grass, cactus, casinos, border patrols, slavery, obesity, immigrant dreams and nightmares with firearms), all without having any real idea of the shape of the country. Perhaps that's why there's something about it I don't quite recognise, why the idea of America hasn't put down roots in me the same way the idea of Europe has. When I read American fiction I feel a vague sense of alienation; now that I know which side of the country LA is on, maybe it will disappear.

The summer is here, bringing with it lethargy, nakedness and a strange sensation of bodily nostalgia which manifests as a heaviness in the stomach. I feel fuzzy-headed and disinclined to leave the house. Did I really dream of this all winter?

At this particular point in time, I am not very interested in the present. I spend half of my mental life projecting myself into the imaginary future, envisioning myself as a happy and assimilated Polish migrant. I don't think very hard about how this will happen or what it entails; instead I think about the feeling of effortlessness that marks life here, a sort of daily absence of friction, and project it onto the half- known landscape of Warsaw. It is partly a feeling of being half asleep, of being entitled to ignore my surroundings because I have absorbed and internalised them. I currently spend my trips to Poland with eyes like saucers, staring around me and straining with the effort of trying to understand how it looks to its inhabitants.

The other half of the time is spent in the archives of the past. My current self operates as a sort of didactic historian in these circumstances, unearthing strata of old bitterness and old joy, adjusting her pince nez and poking with her tweezers, muttering that's why....... ahh, it's because...... don't you see? This world is like the land of dreams, where I am both myself but not myself. It is a world which- like the dreamworld-makes sense both currently and retrospectively, in two entirely different ways.

The present (at present) is nothing but a zone of synthesis for these forces of history and possibility, a cocoon of routine from which I can safely observe what has been and ponder what might become.

I am coming to realise that learning Polish is not the satisfying linear process I had hoped for. Vocab comes and goes, submerging itself when needed and then reappearing at will like an unpredictable hippopotamus. I grope for words that I knew 24 hours ago: the intervention of Anglophone jabber has loosened my tentative ability to talk about tightening a bolt. I am able, by virtue of endless repetition, to ask someone if they have seen Warsaw by the light of the moon, but the words for laundry or lock regularly evade me. Not so automatic baggage locker (bezobslugowa przechowalnia bagazu), which has lodged deep in my left hemispheric cortex despite the very remote likelihood that it will ever be any use.



I like the term language acquisition for describing this process. Acquisition is less passive than learning, more of a struggle. It describes the strong sense of ownership for words gained and also the almost physical sensation of clutching after expression. Language acquired is mental ground ceded and finally reconquered; language fought for, language possessed, language deserved.

My revelation of the week is that I have a choice. Memories of primary school provide me with an exemplary case.

It is nineteen eighty something. I am friends with Shellee Collett, a girl slightly older than me with long, straw-like blonde hair and a nose that looks like it has been broken right in the middle. It hasn't been- two of her sisters have it too and only the youngest, who metamorphosises mysteriously into a snub-nosed, siren-like changeling as the years proceed, has avoided this inheritance.

They come from a farming family and along with the nose the three older sisters also have ample buttocks that my brother claims are perfectly designed to fill a tractor seat. The second sister is in my year and on the first day of school, when she stands in front of the class to be introduced, she has a smear of something orange beside her mouth. I have a mental snapshot of this moment which has somehow escaped erasure from my archives: Lori Collett standing in front of 20 children, with a home cut fringe, a pair of terrified hazel eyes and something unidentifiable caught up in the fine blonde hairs along her upper lip.

The details of how I came to be friends with Shellee Collett are lost in the mists of time, but I remember that she had an enviable way of flinging the long blonde hair over her shoulder. She lived with her family in a large farmhouse with a wraparound verandah and took showers instead of baths. I don't think our relationship lasted very long, since I can only remember being inside the house once. In fact, I think it was over in the moment I am going to describe to you.

I am sitting with her above the oval, watching the boys playing soccer. There is a row of rose bushes along the embankment where we sit. It is morning, before school starts on a warm day, probably early summer. We are watching the game and I make some forgotten comment on the tomboy girls who have joined in the match.

Suddenly she stands. She says, I'm a tomboy too, you know. She flings her hair over her shoulder with a determination I have never seen in her before, and plunges down the hill to join the game. I am burning to follow her, having long harboured my own fantasies about sportive inclusion, but I am far too scared of being mocked or rejected. She is absorbed into the game without comment while I peer down bitterly from amongst the rose bushes and curse my own timidity. From this moment onwards, she is one of the girls who has the right to join in all boyish activity on the school grounds.

Twenty five years later, I am finally magnanimous enough to openly admire the tractor-arsed Shellee Collett for this magnificent decisive act. It is possible to simply decide that you want to live a certain way, and do so. This is a lovely possibility and I will bear it in mind from now on.

After a month of susceptibility to every winter germ on the market, the colour has gone out of the world somewhat. I have finally succumbed, admitted that my immune system is unequal to the task of eight hour work days, and made the decision to abandon fiscal caution and spend three days at home. The most beautiful part of these days is the morning sleep. Alone in the bed (a blissful condition), I wallow in the morning sun that pours in through the blinds. I wake and read for a while, drink some tea, sleep again. This sleep is populated with swooping circular dreams which inevitably include the plot device of at least one bicycle theft. It seems that this event has replaced the exam nightmares and concentration camp dreams of my early twenties; as if, entering on the decade of greatest solidity, the most fearful prospect is the loss of material possessions.

On this subject: facing unemployment (or underemployment) and the prospect of another six months in the country, I'm forced to meditate on a recent penchant for buying clothes and hoarding money, activities which give me a disproportionate satisfaction. I consume therefore I am. A growing wardrobe renders me a person of consequence.

I suspect it all means that regardless of my blessings I feel fundamentally unsafe, and wonder if love and luck carry their own dark burden of fear which cancels out the joy. Ahh, the manic-depressive counterpoint of my third decade- a steady drumbeat of prospective loss shadowing the high hopeful strains of possession.

There's something magical about my weekend rides with Marcin around the city. For him it is still a strange land, and he swivels his head, open- mouthed as a showground clown, taking everything in. We sail lycra- clad through the suburbs, stopping to admire an indoor swimming pool enclosed in a high glass cage and drenched in light, a narrow-edged building wedged onto a street corner like a slice of cheese, a lozenge-shaped house perched on the cliffs looking out over the blue wind-whipped Pacific. We explore the brown, oily reaches of the Parramatta River and find a tree with a strange, thick-skinned bulbous fruit on it; we pick one, stomp on it and poke it with a stick to see what's inside. In the space of a single evening we see a fog sculpture ( emitting an atmospheric hiss and a cloud of steam into a stand of casuarinas in Olympic Park), a crowd of football supporters and a Bangladeshi boy band.

The seedy, foul and merely depressing are transformed by his presence into the stuff of adventure. We go to the industrial hinterland around the airport and watch the planes take off. One day we find a mound of dumped oranges near a fruit wholesalers on the ring road sending off an acid smell of mould so strong you can almost see it floating by in a blue haze. In the grass nearby there is a rampant crop of zucchini plants running down to the banks of a malodorous canal. We are democratically excited by both a flock of ibises picking at some kind of biological waste, and a 360 degree water view.

Only a particular kind of companion can enable you to understand the wonders of rot and sprawl, smoke stacks and industrial waste, freeways and plastic-littered mangroves. On the occasion of our second wedding anniversary, I can confirm that Marcin Ojrzynski is that kind of companion.

Hypochondria part 2

It is not the visible ailments which bother me; the bruises and sore muscles and other afflictions of the limbs and skin. These things affect the levers and coating of the body, and can be looked at, prodded and dismissed. What I am concerned with are the more intimate rebellions of the dark damp places at the core of the body, the sticky internal revolts which cannot be gauged from close examination of the surface. What excrescences may be slowly growing across the blood-flushed surfaces there, what sudden failures of lymph might be occurring, what rampant multiplication of cells? These things are as mysterious to me as the workings of an electric circuit, and thus as prone to sudden and inexplicable breakdown.



And so I live in frightening and turbulent times. On the surface, all is calm. I wake in the morning and drink my tea, reading a recipe book, watching the football. Slowly my resentment at being conscious at this obscene hour wears off. I leave the house just before sunrise and pedal by the calm reaches of Canada Bay, all rosy and benign in the pre-dawn light, and over the mouth of the Parramatta River. I am thinking about money, our trip to Asia, a photocopy I have forgotten to make, a book I'm reading. Some days I feel stronger, some less strong. Some days there is wind and some days I need gloves to keep my fingers functioning in the cold. I take a shower, turn on the heater, sit at the computer. I sign some papers, give some advice (they are not orders in this business) and the day is over.



Superficially it is an ordinary existence. But there is another life I live where I am struck down day after day with terminal ailments: I poke at my underarms and groin, looking for unexplained swellings, obsessively fingering sore places. I watch myself for forgetfulness or lack of balance which may indicate a tumour of the brain. Any pain or abnormality is magnified into something critical. The internet assists in this; a google search of a single given symptom can provide a thousand unpleasant possibilities. My workmate (unaware of my private preoccupations) says, "Cancer always seems to start in the wet places, doesn't it? The mucous membranes, the lymph nodes, the organs." I shudder and spend the day visualising chaos in my own wet places. Then I wonder what effect the chemical accelerations of anxiety might have on this hidden activity.


Neurologically speaking, our brain is not developed enough to allow us to fully conceive of consequences or make rational decisions until we are in our twenties. I am now thirty years old, with a well-formed amygdala that allows me to consider the possibilities for the future, and I am suddenly afraid of dying.

I have been a hypochondriac for my entire life. My first phantom illness was at the age of two, when I developed a mysterious limp which lasted for several months. My parents hauled me around the country to all sorts of different specialists after my mother had watched me like a hawk for some time and realised that I was hobbling consistently and not only when I thought somebody was looking. Family wisdom has it that I was inspired to do this in order to compete for concern and attention with my brother, a year younger than me and sickly from the beginning with chronic diarrhea. The specialists found nothing wrong and the limp eventually passed, leaving me with a slightly shrunken leg and my parents none the wiser. I proceeded onto the usual childhood illnesses, the most memorable being a series of bouts of raging tonsillitis, which brought more concrete rewards in the form of special invalid foods: roast chicken and exotic juices and nectars sold in exclusive one-litre cartons instead of cans or plastic bottles.

The next serious imaginary illness developed in my teens. At the age of thirteen, I stopped eating. Anorexia was suspected, but in fact it was a conscious ploy to keep me out of school where I was the current pariah amongst my group of female friends. It's a feat which mystifies me even today: I put myself on strict rations of a cup of milk a day, and stayed home in my nightie getting thinner and thinner. I don't know what eventually convinced me to give it up and go back to school; it might have been the get well card which came from my class, signed by my tormentors in a way that made me believe that all was forgiven. It turned out to be a ruse, because on my first day back at school they followed me into the toilets where they loudly declared that they knew I hadn't really been sick, while I cowered in a cubicle and considered my options.

After the uncertain success of this illness, the hypochondria went into abeyance for a while. In my early twenties I developed a few real ailments which seem to have kept me busy over this period: cerebral malaria, cervical dysplasia, a Cambodian parasite which had me projectile vomiting for three weeks, a broken collarbone, anaemia.

In the last year or so, the phantom diseases have returned. They always have their basis in a real physical symptom which is then magnified into something terminal, helped along by google-diagnosis and a consciousness that I'm now reaching an age where things really might go wrong.
They serve a different psychological purpose than their predecessors, which I didn't really believe in but used as means to an end. Now they form part of an elaborate game of worst scenarios which I have started playing, in order to second guess my own physical vulnerability. If I treat every swollen lymph node as lymphoma, I will always be prepared for the worst. This is a hypochondria for the mature years, and probably the thing which convinces me more than anything else that I am ageing.

The connection between armpits and blogging

Today I caught sight of my winter-pale armpit in the mirror as I tried to remove my cycling shirt and put on a jumper at the same time, and realised that I haven't looked closely at my own organism since the end of summer. This led to an equally unexpected craving to return to the public self exposure of blogging. Maybe the strange bodily secrecy of this time of year can find its counterpoint here.

Our first death, a drug overdose. Fergus, blue faced and stiff on a Saturday afternoon. The irrevocable words have reverberated all week: Fergus is dead, Fergus is dead, Fergus is dead. I'm unaccustomed to death, and masticate this pronouncement as I go about my business, needing to be convinced. What is the protocol, in these circumstances? He wasn't my friend. I was paid to know him. Nevertheless, I had a great affection for him- lazy, dishonest Fergus whose collection of pornos gave the lie to the claim that psychiatric medication ruins your libido. Well-mannered Fergus who shoved Cum in my Bum out of sight under his couch cushions when we came into his house. Gentle Fergus, who loved his mother and got upset when she split up with her boyfriend. Fergus who loved movies and good music and wrote short ecstatic poems about the small joys of life- trees and birds and the breath in your lungs.

I mourn him in a sneaky and sporadic fashion, listening to Union Station (to which he introduced me), looking at the order of service with his grinning bearded face on it, crying sometimes when there is nobody to challenge my right to do so. I look at our other clients and wonder that they are alive and he is not. Mostly, I just wish it hadn't happened.

Australia Day in Portland

Heading out of Sydney for the long weekend- ten minutes to the freeway, half an hour to the foot of the mountains. Out past Mount Victoria the sky starts to open up and the concerns of city life dissipate perceptibly: here there are too few buildings or people for anxiety to reverberate as it does in the crowded psychic spaces of the inner west. Paranoid fantasies develop, detach, and float off into the ether like clouds, lost in a wash of light.

In this state of beautiful unconcern, I miss the turnoff for Rylstone. We drive along a minor road, passing through rural backwaters which are bleached and empty under the midday sun. Until, unexpectedly, after another wrong turn we find ourselves in the main street of Portland.
The road has been blocked off for Australia Day celebrations. There is a tattered jumping castle, a one-horse carousel and the air is rich with the smell of frying sausages. At the very front of this scene, there is a formation of line dancers, none of them younger than 60. One of them has yellow flowers on her hat and a surprising sense of rhythm: her post-menopausal flesh, bulging around her belt, moves in precise time with the music. She sings along, her eyes fixed on the horizon; kicks her leg up, pirouettes. One of her companions dances alongside her carefully on chalky bones, with her fading face obscured by an enormous Stetson.

We walk through the sun- blasted streets, smirking at each other. I cannot decide whether it's a scene possessed of some odd dignity, or the most depressing thing I've ever seen.

A long time between blogs, an indication that life post-thesis is no less frantic and fragmented than life before. I am moved to write today after resurrecting the ancient anecdote of my encounter with a Turkish would-be rapist to tell Marcin. Having not repeated it for years, I was overcome with melancholy memories of my fearless twenties, and relief that I actually managed to survive them. My father's theory is that an understanding of consequences is a result of sophisticated biological developments which don't come about until the mid- twenties. In any case, I'm not that ferocious penis-biting creature any longer: my current profile is closer to that of a middle-aged hypochondriac. What a difference a decade can make.