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As mentioned in my first blog, I’m up the spout. Clearly, having a baby is the most natural thing in the world but that doesn’t stop it from being freaky and strange. There’s no controlling the physical changes and sensations that pregnancy involves. It’s a bit like getting on a rollercoaster and having no choice other than to just hang on and deal with everything that happens in between when the ride starts and when it ends (and note that during both pregnancy and rollercoaster rides, “everything that happens” often involves spontaneous spew.)
I’m ridiculously excited about having a baby (although I haven’t quite worked up the same excitement about the fact that this process will ultimately involve the destruction of my downstairs department, but never mind.) But I’m often finding the physical changes hard to get my head around. Seriously. I feel as though I’m mutating.
The belly-getting-bigger part is actually cool. It’s now big enough to warrant stares – usually my own while I stand with my shirt pulled up in front of the mirror. I go into department store fitting rooms empty-handed, just to take advantage of the multiple mirrors that let you check yourself out from every angle. Last week the fitting room attended asked if I was trying anything on and I replied “No, I’m just looking,” which I thought was a fair and accurate response until much later when I realized she might have thought I was there to perve on other people. In any case she didn’t seem to have a problem with it and let me through.
Strangers stare at my belly now, too. I don’t mind so much now that it’s obvious I’m pregnant. In the first few months I felt embarrassed because I just looked like I’d spent too long in the pantry. My preferred explanation during that time was “It’s ok, I’m not fat – there’s someone in there.”
I also spend a lot of time navel-gazing. My belly-button used to be an “innie” but now it’s definitely an “outie” to the point where it looks a bit like the button you push at the traffic lights before you cross the road. I keep showing my navel to The Bloke and telling him to push it but he refuses – he reckons it looks more like an ejector button and if he pushes it either the baby will come early or my head will fly off.
So generally I’m ok with my mutant status but every now and then – despite the fact that I know it’s all perfectly natural – I have a little freak-out. Feeling The Sprout, as I call her, kick around like crazy for the first time was amazing but also totally, utterly overwhelming to the point where I promptly burst into a flood of tears.
“None of this is freaky,” soothed The Bloke at the time. “Gemma Arterton is freaky. Google her – she’ll make you feel better.”
So I did, and immediately discovered that Gemma Arterton is one of the latest Bond girls. At first I thought this was The Bloke’s idea of a sick joke. How was a stunning Bond girl going to make me feel better? I Googled harder: hmmm, Gemma Arterton. Young? Check. Beautiful? Check. Born with twelve fingers? Check. Youbetcha.
In a recent interview for her Bond movie Gemma revealed that she was born with an extra finger on each hand. Hot or not? I guess it’s hot if you’re into porn films titled “Mitten Surprise” but if you’re everybody else in the world, probably not. It got better, though. Gemma went on to say in her interview that she still has small lumps on the side of her hands following the childhood procedure she underwent to have the extra fingers removed. She then casually mentioned that the procedure she underwent as a child to have them removed involved them being “tied” CAUSING THEM TO FALL OFF NATURALLY. This immediately made me decide the following:
Enjoy Tying The Knot Without Doing Your Block (The Bloke features heavily!) and thanks for reading my blogs.
On any form that asks me to list my occupation I usually answer “Writer/Broadcaster/Comedian” but technically, I’m leaving something out. If there was more room on those forms I really should be adding “Highly-skilled procrastinator.”
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore what I do for a living and can’t for the life of me imagine doing anything else. I just like to take my sweet time when I’m going about my work. I tell myself things like “I just need to let the ideas bounce around my head for a while” or “If I spend time just mulling over it now, it’ll be much easier when I actually sit down to write.” Maybe on some level these statements are true but most of the time they’re probably crap. I’m just a big procrastinator.
Over the years that I’ve spent writing stand-up comedy, television material, freelance articles, various sketches and scripts, web content and most recently my book (author!) I’ve also completed a myriad of tasks in the name of procrastination. Some of these tasks have included (and I’m not making any of these up):
And then there’s procrastinating by purposely distracting myself with television. The Bloke is mad for sport so we have cable TV, but I only ever really watch it when I’ve run out of household tasks to perform in the name of procrastination. Chat shows are my current televisual drug of choice and over the last couple of months I’ve been sucked in by Ellen. I think Ellen DeGeneres is a brilliant comedian. She exudes great warmth and candour and has used her position as a host and celebrity to encourage donations to a number of worthy causes. Despite that, I’ve decided that Ellen’s show can bite me.
It’s a chat show, right? So what’s with all the dancing? I got a stopwatch out during one episode (yes, I do have too much time on my hands) and Ellen spent just under six minutes dancing. Dancing by herself, dancing with the audience, dancing with the guests. And it’s actually unnerving to watch, because she’s doing the kind of dancing you do while you’re stirring something on the stove. It’s the kind of dancing you do when nobody else is watching. Basically, she’s doing the kind of dancing you might do before you take your pants off and frankly, watching her do it in front of millions of people always makes me feel weird.
Ellen has a live DJ on-set (as opposed to a dead one, which would be awkward and no doubt raise questions.) Her DJ is the whitest man in the world and looks more like the sort of guy you’d expect to find repairing computers. He spins a tune, Ellen takes her dancing into the audience and the audience in turn goes right off. Ellen gets her groove on and everyone around her starts shaking it as though their pills have just kicked in. I sit there on the couch thinking “Why am I watching this? And where are my pills?”
One day I watched the show and was surprised to find Ellen being uncharacteristically serious. She was talking about something that had happened at one of the animal shelters she supports and it seemed like a pretty sad situation. “She can’t possibly dance now,” I thought to myself. Ellen’s last line of the segment? “Tell you what I love almost as much as animals? I love dancing.”
Never underestimate a 50-year-old woman who wears a suit jacket and tennis shoes.
NEXT: I MIGHT BE MUTATING, BUT AT LEAST I HAVE THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF FINGERS
I’m not great with anything technical and I never really have been. If it’s got a power cord coming out of it, chances are that I will struggle to operate it correctly and/or possibly damage it in some way. Put it this way, the main reason blackouts annoy me is because they remind me that I have no idea how to re-set the time on my microwave.
Computer repair guys love me because I don’t understand a word they’re saying. I imagine that while they’re speaking to me, thoughts of what they’re going to do with all my money run through their heads. A new iPhone, a high-class escort or perhaps the latest in computer repair gadgetry. Whatever, computer repair guy. At least my skin’s seen sunlight. (Why is it that every computer repair guy I’ve ever met looks like he’s spent the majority of his life in an underground bunker?)
I tend to think of my laptop as a fancy-pants typewriter because that’s the best way for me to understand the way it works. I type, it stores my typing – in my mind, there’s no need for things to be any more involved or complicated than that. So you can imagine my helplessness whenever something goes wrong with it. Multiply that feeling by one hundred, add a good dose of panic and you’ll be across how I felt when my laptop carked it on day three of my book-writing retreat to Port Fairy.
Days one and two had been magnificent but on day three my computer just kept spontaneously shutting down. I rang The Bloke, who’s usually pretty good at technical stuff but even he couldn’t diagnose the problem. It probably didn’t help that I kept describing said problem with the phrase “It keeps shutting down – I think maybe it’s blown a foofer-valve.” Foofer-valve of course being a technical term that basically means I am a bloody idiot.
The Bloke tracked down a computer repair service in nearby Warrnambool and I immediately rang Snow White, who’s now my all-time favourite computer repair guy. He took my laptop away for a day and when he returned with it, announced he’d fixed the problem, saved my manuscript but now needed to take me through a brand-new start-up process. I grabbed a pen and paper and immediately broke into a sweat.
When we got to the bit about connecting to my wireless network, Whitey asked what my connection password was. “I don’t know” I gasped, feeling the beginning of a nervous rash, “It used to connect automatically so I never had to use it.”
After remembering that The Bloke had originally set the password, I called him at work: “Quick – what’s the password for our wireless connection?” He told me. The colour drained from my face. Snow White blinked at me expectantly.
You’ll never know how it felt having to tell that guy that my password was “Buttmunch,” the only advantage being that I think he may have given me a discount on his fee because I made him laugh so hard.
On the other hand, what did The Bloke’s co-workers think when they saw him answer the phone, say one word – “Buttmunch” – and then hang up again?
Sometimes I think life would be far more dignified if we were all Amish.
NEXT: YOU’LL KNOW I’VE GOT A WRITING DEADLINE WHEN YOU SEE ME DETAILING MY CAR.
I’m often curious as to how authors go about the business and pleasure of writing their books so I thought I’d tell you how I went about writing mine. (That’s only the second time I’ve ever referred to myself as an author – put me down for another air-punch!)
It has to be said that I piss-farted about a lot. I’m a huge procrastinator (more on that in another blog entry) so it took me ages (like, months) to get into the real nitty-gritty of nutting out all those chapters. This was despite the fact that I had a head start: because the book was based on one of my comedy festival shows, the “bones” of the book were already there. All I had to do was turn roughly 7,000 words into roughly 70,000. (Yep, the first thing I did when I was offered the chance to write my book was regress to high school by immediately asking “How many words does it have to be?” Then I added up all the words in the final script of my festival show to see how much work I had to do. Hello, I’m 31.)
There’s nothing quite like the pressure of a looming deadline so after a few months of faffing about and trying to convince myself that telling people I was writing a book and spending ages thinking about writing it was just as important as actually getting started, I began turning in my chapters.
The “bones” of the book were the anecdotal bits: the stories and experiences that I’d used in my festival show. In order to put some meat on these bones and create my chapters I had to re-work the stories so they were suitable for reading rather than hearing and then add the relevant advice, hints or practical information about wedding-planning. This involved going back over what The Bloke and I did during the course of planning our wedding as well as doing a bit of research in case I’d missed anything important to the planning process (The Bloke and I had a reasonably standard wedding but there was a bunch of wedding stuff we didn’t bother doing – I wanted to make sure that anyone who read my book wouldn’t suffer from the fact that The Bloke and I were often lazy-arses.)
Initially my progress was really slow and stilted, mainly because my ‘day’ job is working as a writer for TV and radio and on the days that I was paying the bills by doing that I found it very difficult to switch out of that headspace and into book-headspace. This continued for a while until The Bloke picked up on my frustration (probably thanks to the fact that I kept banging on about it) and suggested I pack up my laptop and Eddie, our giant beagle, and take a week or so off at the family house in Port Fairy, a little seaside town about three hours from Melbourne.
This was a genius idea and worked a treat – I ended up writing about half the entire book there! There was nothing else to juggle – no other writing to do, no work meetings, no radio shows, no household to run. No land-line and I could turn my mobile off all day if I felt like not being interrupted. Nothing whatsoever to draw me out of my book-headspace, unless you count the day Eddie went completely off his dial after a couple of wallabies dropped in out the back and chased him around the yard.
In Port Fairy, I could stay up writing all night when I got on a roll without worrying about being too tired to fulfill my day job commitments the next day, or The Bloke feeling alone and neglected in bed (not that he’d ever complain or even comment but I’d know that’s how he was feeling.) Breaks involved taking Eddie for big runs along the beach, walking into town for fresh bread and coffee, and polishing off all the Tim Tams in the pantry. It was writer’s bliss, pure and simple, and at the time I felt a bit like a cross between Virginia Woolf in A Room Of One’s Own and Carrie from Sex And The City (not that I was having nervous breakdowns or casual sex, but you know what I mean.) It was the most perfect, most productive time. That is, until my laptop carked it…
NEXT: WHY I’M WARY AND INTIMIDATED BY ANTHING WITH A POWER CORD COMING OUT OF IT.
Hello, and welcome to me. Let me just say right from the outset that I’m not an expert here: this is my first-ever blog and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never even read a blog, probably because I don’t do FaceBook, MySpace or Twitter. (Actually, I tried MySpace once but it was kind of like that time I tried hallucinogenic drugs: I was told I’d love it but honestly, surely no-one needs that many imaginary friends.) So because I’m not exactly au fait with all this I’m not really sure what kind of information I’m meant to include here – current status? Grocery list? Favourite TV guide blurb of all time?
The Random Blog 