Little White Liar

Brothers

I'll be the first to admit that I used to play favourites with my little brothers. I know, it's wrong.

A lot of my preference had to do with plain circumstance. At four years younger than me and three years older than Tye, for the majority of family history Ben was the 'middle child' - accessible enough in age to both his junior and senior siblings. To put it in perspective: the summer I left home to go to university, Ben attended my going-away party and managed to tuck back booze with the college kids for a solid two hours before passing out in a pool of his own vomit. A month earlier on family vacation, 10-year-old Tye had been too short to ride rollercoasters.

Ben and I also have both parents in common, whereas Tye is a half-caff version. The three of us all inherited our father's dark humour -- but unlike Ben and I (who lean toward maternal cynicism), Tye has his mother's gentle delivery to keep him from outright meanness. In a word, he's very '3.0'.

As we all get older, the age gaps matter less than geographical distance. The last time I saw Tye before moving abroad was his high school graduation day. When I went home this Christmas, he was 3 inches taller, 30 pounds lighter, and just 10 months shy of hitting legal American drinking age. With the three of us together in our 20s for the first time (all of our faces settled into their adult shapes), I realised how blurry the old allegiance lines have become.

Ben looks just like my mother -- the same expressive green eyes, the exact crinkle around his smiling mouth. Tye and I both look just like our father. Studying him with fresh eyes this December, I was startled to realise that this meant we have ended up looking just like each other. Ben, my constant childhood companion and lifetime confidante, would have been a stranger's easy guess as the half-brother.

The wrench in the works would have been Tye and Ben's easy friendship, built steadily through years of maintaining no more than 30 miles of distance between them, lacking the cross-equatorial early morning phone calls and daddy issues that I bring to the table. In the two years I've been gone, Tye and Ben stopped being my kid brothers and started acting like the family's latest generation of adults, propping up the branch without me. I'm simultaneously shocked to recognise traces of them as boys, and to discover how little I know of them as men.

Over the holidays a long-lost half-sister also appeared, aged 18 with alien blond hair and happy blue eyes, standing heads shorter than her amazonian brothers and sister. She's a pure stranger in our midst. Other than a deep knowledge that none of us could ever hook up with her, there is nothing to discern this girl from any other happy-go-lucky pocket-sized hippie from upstate New York. Of course outside of the fact that after a lifetime of brothers, she is the only blood sister I'm likely ever have. And so I returned to Oz with the resolution to be in better touch with my siblings.

Since January, I have been chatting weekly to one or more of them on instant messenger or Skype. I called Tye late yesterday night, and woke him up on his Monday morning. We chatted for an hour before he told me that his mother (who I adore) was in the house. I asked to be passed over to her and he did so without announcing my identity.

"Amanda?" she said. "Hello?"

The connection paused once and then jumped to catch up with itself, smashing her greeting together and making me wonder if I had missed some other guesses. "Yeah it's me! How did you know?"

"Oh, Tye's voice changes when he talks to you. I can always tell when you two are talking."

"Changes? How?" My two brothers sound identical on the phone. I figured she might say he curses more, or uses a high volume of the jargon that we pass off as sibling-slang.

"It gets deeper and softer. More nurturing. It's very sweet."

To me, what she describes is just Tye's voice. I've never heard him use another. I wonder if he has merged toward Ben's over time, or whether both of my brothers have a dialect on reserve for me. Whether I wouldn't even recognise messages from them on someone else's answering machine. Whether you can ever really know a complex adult as completely as you did a simple child.

Wardrobe change

Sorry everyone, for some reason I just can't bring myself to post here lately. I don't have the time, creative energy, or honestly, the inclination to use this format at the moment. 

BUT.

I've sold out and set up accounts on other (less intense) incarnations of internet media. If you're interested, please come and follow me at:

http://amandasbananas.tumblr.com/

http://twitter.com/amandasbananas

Hope to see you around :)

- Amanda

Too much time, too little talking

After a certain amount of time has passed between phone calls, or photos taken together, or visits, or journal entries, life just feels impossible to summarize. I lose entire pieces of this story until I find myself in some house party at 4am with a German boy in French glasses, and the conversation we have thaws some of the frozen bees of memory and makes them buzz. In 16 hours I will board a flight home, and begin the day's journey toward family and friends who want a year and a half of story swarm.

Of course I'm excited. I miss so many things about New York, to the point of sudden incapacity at the strangest times. Some then-beautiful creature makes eyes at me across the bar, and when he finds his way over and resorts, within the first minute, to asking how long I've been in Australia...that's when it comes. When a lecture comes to the finest and most intimate points of the own American accent (previously unknown even to me), and a hundred heads spin in their seats to stare at me as if expecting...what? Then I miss being home.

I'm also anxious -- about the cold, and the possibility of going broke given my dismal position on the current exchange rate. I'm in love with my city and sad to leave her for a month of summer, even to flip hemisphere "homes." Riding to and from from my last day in the office of 2008, I drank up the vision of the Opera House sliding by, feeling homesick for a building before it was even out of eyesight. I'm worried that my accent has changed, or my way of walking, or two dozen small things that will mark me as a stranger in the place that I hold in my heart as territory least strange.

There are so many things to try and remember:
- Aussie Thanksgiving and throwing another turkey on the barbie
- The changing shade of the Opera House across the path of the sun
- Bollywood dancing dinner and Nic's job offer
- Hitting the kangaroo
- Jake eating glass, and Anand breaking that chair
- Sam going bald up top and big in the guns region
- Wetting myself on my own front steps
- How our Turkish teacher totally misfortuned the English language
- The size and colour of seagulls
- Black sand beaches and the boy from Tehran
- Conversations with the insane
- And so on...

Unlovely

You want monotony?

There was spring, for a little while. With the morning birdsongs of paradise and the afternoons of slip-sliding toward 35C, oversized sunglasses and the short-sleeves with ruffles that go transparent in the sun. But now winter is back with her cold winds and her bitter rains, and my feet can't remember being dry or sandy or sunk to the ankle in new grass.

The semester is ending and the professors are tired and the tutors have given up, thinking: If not by now, never. The deadlines are coming hot and heavy, panting down our necks like sexual harassment while everyone has their eyes wild on the windows and doors. I'm falling out of love with all the research topics that made my heart beat these past few months. I don't give a toss about theoretical framework.

Also, the economy and the sky are falling. America sneezes and the global markets get AIDs. Every day I learn cute new foreign names for people losing their jobs: retrenched, made redundant. I'm sorry sir, we're sending you back to the battle. Ma'am, your position is needlessly needlessly needlessly repetitive. You're fired and fired and fired. If I lose my job I have to leave Australia or become a fugitive. The thought alone gave me a twitch in the right eyelid that's been around for three weeks.

I fell in the shower on Saturday and I'm covered in a literal rainbow of bruises. Somehow, I pulled the toilet seat off on my way down. I reached for a towel and lost my footing and nearly my life, and that's what they probably meant about cleanliness being close to Godliness. My maker almost reclaimed me as he or she forsook me: wet, naked, scared, hot pink and shaking.

In six days I turn 27. I've given my crush a terminal diagnosis: my ill-fated love has only until November to live. As soon as I made this decision, I had four back-to-back nights of dreams about him. They all lack the gauze of surreality that would normally keep nighttime separate from daytime. What I mean to say is, these dreams are so comfortable and normal that when I see him a half a day after waking, I find myself starting to continue our conversation before realizing that he hadn't actually been a party to the opening. Not really.

Tomorrow there's an employee review where I give myself a 50% chance of not being asked to pack up my desk. 10% chance of managing not to cry, as pathetic a figure as I cut anymore: bruised from the shin to the wrist, heartsick, braindead, so obviously far from my own kind.

U-Curve

Yesterday was a good one. There's this U-Curve Theory for sojourner happiness and if it applies, I am hugging the right-hand slope and curving skyward. 

I spent the weekend in the company of geniuses, sitting for nine hours a day in lecture halls getting my brain inflated. Nowadays, my head feels like a tight pink balloon with uncountable molecules swirling inside. Anymore, my smile is the white crescent that flips toward the sun.

My friends and I are living our lives out on box calendars, but all the borders between the days are those red laser lights and all of the academics are Catherine Zeta Joneses catcrawling through them. In three weeks I'll be halfway through my Masters degree. Eleven weeks ago, I wouldn't have been able to decipher the paper I submitted on Friday. In July I read thirty academic Linguistics articles and in December I will submit one for publication. How is it already October? Time reproduces so unpredictably.

Everyone is asking, what's next? After your Masters, after your friends move on and your boyfriends stay behind, after the two-year mark abroad, then what? The truth is, Australia is one of the great loves of my life. What follows from that is, if and when I have to leave her, it's going to break my fucking heart.

These lives that we're given are too short, too constrained. This body isn't built exactly to my specifications. I wanted at least 100 more years and the ability to fly.

I want to move to Germany and teach English. I want to travel around Europe on the weekends and drink cafe in piazzas and learn languages and have romances and mix up my accent and forget where I left that lovely sweater I bought in Nice.

I want to do my PhD in Hawaii, and write my dissertation with fresh flowers in my hair and sand in my toes. I want to buy a Vespa and get a quiet cottage and hole myself up with a pile of books and bathing suits and let my mind come around on itself like that snake eating its own tail.

I want to stay in Australia with this comfortable set of scholars and friends, in the yellow-white sun, and spend a few decades in the bittersweet pursuit of a boy who won't ever love me back. I want to be this sharp, this alive, just this side of combustion, until...

Traveler Philosophy: overheard on the train

Two German backpackers and I hung from the same pole on a commuter train this morning. From what I can gather from eavesdropping between the sounds of the rails, they have been in Australia for two weeks and they try not to think about how much they miss home. They want to cook someone dinner, and they hear that Aldi has familiar products. The girls discuss the four Sydney streets they know between then, and come to the conclusion that Aldi is on none of them.

The pretty brunette says, "We must get maps before we go, then. I don't know myself in this place. I could easily become lost."

Shameless plea for cuss words

Hey guys! I'm doing a paper this week on cross-cultural use of insults and I've made a super quick quiz to gather some research. I would LOVE if you could take the time (about 3-4 minutes) to just fill in the answers. So I can like, graduate, and get a real job, and not live on couches forever. You know.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=sja3DNzpuDJZbnr2XmYdWQ_3d_3d

Round-up

My journal sucks lately.

If you read that as, "I should totally update my blog more, lol!" please stop. Stop reading, responding, maybe stop using the internet for a little while because maybe we have a deep misunderstanding of what's going on here.

My journal sucks lately because it's not an accurate record, and it's not really representative of my life as it's unfolding, and therefore it won't serve me or other people in any way into the future. I'm sorry, this should be a better reference. I could be better.

For my personal future reference, here is a list of things that consumed me in the first weeks of southern spring in 2008:

It's been something like six years since my father and I stopped speaking, and when Ben tells me that he's sick I'm not sure whether I should react like a daughter or a stranger. I spent so much of my childhood being bullied by this adult, and so much of my adolescence twisting myself around the idea that someday the universe would punch back on my behalf. But now in my adulthood I see an old man living on an island of his own creation (whittled from any other landmass by bitterness, and whiplash anger, and undiscriminating lies, and some cold hard meanness that I still can't comprehend), and I just feel sad.

My mother wants to split the price to get me back for Thanksgiving, and just like the ticket and the continents I'm in two hearts about it. I want to see my brother and mother almost desperately, and a family holiday might be just the thing for this orphan of time zones. But the 48 hour plane log, and the $2,000 price tag, and the time away from work, all for the sake of a week or so sitting on a couch in New York just seem so far out of the range of reality that I can't accept the possibility of anything coming to pass. And most of all, at the end of November my first Australian summer will be opening up, and university will be shutting down, and all of my friends will be frocked out and ready for ocean-licked beach balcony nights. Would I trade that for the northern hemisphere's bitter winter and disconnected cellphones of friends-since-moved-on?

The implications of which are: how am I ever ever ever going to extract myself from Australia? Every day my roots drill a little deeper - I meet a new friend, I get a good academic offer, I excel at work or attract notice from competitors, I fall in love with a restaurant, I learn cab routes, I become the point of contact for some newer, fresher face. When I think about America now, already 15 months distant, it feels the same as thinking of a past relationship - fuzzy on the details, mostly warm, sometimes bitter, and most of all: over. Conjuring my brother's face, I found myself bringing up an image of the latest photo I'd seen rather than hitting play on the old running reel. I didn't realize yesterday was September 11 until I handed in a paper with the date written on it and a professor remarked on my nationality. Being American has become a schtick ("Say it again") rather than an identity. How can I reclaim myself, and do I want to?

Most disconcertingly, I'm in junior high school style love and I can't shake it and I can't behave and I'm losing my cool thrice weekly because when he sits next to me and his clothes brush mine my stomach slams against my knees and instead of saying "Hey" I'm afraid the next thing to come out of my mouth will be vomit. He's perfect, which means he's taken. Yes he knows how I feel. Yes he knows how to encourage me without ever having to spend one tousle-headed, pillowed second feeling guilty about his actions. Yes I'm doing the Wrong Thing and chasing him despite all of this, and openly, and publicly, because there's no other choice inside my chest with my heart already pounding like we'd been through fields and forests, dodging.

The semester is halfway through, which means my degree is a quarter over. I can't believe it's gone this fast and I feel like I've learned nothing. In my mind's eye I'm still the one in the pointed hat in the corner of the class with a little drool sparkling. But then these alien words will come out of my mouth, arranged coherently, placed properly, used with force and reason, and they will make brilliant heads get bobbing in an ocean around me. The human capacity to absorb information is astonishing, especially in the case of your own brain. This learning curve is steeper than the stairs at Shea stadium and I'm still dragging myself up them. I'm talking PhD destinations with the head of my department and being casually approached to take my doctorate under professors who have watched me struggle up to lock-elbowed opinion. How quickly eight weeks go by.

This is the fastest year of my life. I mean, each year is a treadmill that goes as fast as it wants to and there's nothing we can do but run until we fall off. But I hope that in my eagerness to get to whatever level is up next, I haven't neglected looking around me. I'm almost 27 now. But 26 has been so fine.

Jabberwocky

Let's not talk sense. Let's have room for the opposite. Let's revisit over and over that sea-stomach feeling of your eyes looking at stranger for the first time and your soul or heart or sense of blown-out hope rising up with an illogical "Hello again."

At the start everyone wants to compete. Reposition. Track tiny rings around each other, unroll words as a way of measure, use birthplace as weapons to be wielded. Everyone wants to see who's the best at really listening while also formulating the next brilliant response. No, wait. Let's all be friends with different targets that overlap, right here, right now, so far from whatever other fork is coming or gone.

I've been jumping concentric circles until I got so close to the middle of the blue-sky puddle it looks like a watery gasp, or a vortex that opens up on the known future. I've been learning new information second-hand about an absentee and juggling surface surprise with deeper reaffirmation. Let's live our lives like a puzzle whose image you already know and whose pieces you just have to slip into place: this is where we met, this is the first time a phrase from my mouth forced a smile from yours, this is the day we got married, no wait, it doesn't fit there, put that one aside for a second. Let's agree to work from the corners inward. It's too daunting, in this case, to go straight to the center.

I'm going to bounce hurdles with shoulders instead of knees. I'm going to take my challenges and hold them so loosely that they slip and blow from my fingers in the spring breeze. I'm going to wait in this window looking out on forever and trust, for once, for now, that its view hasn't been engineered or hallucinated. I'm going to get what I want.

Composition Challenge #12 - Oh my god, guys...

I just remembered the grossest thing that's happened to me since I moved abroad, AND I have a bonus disgusting story from a fellow Masters student. But before all of that comes out, and in honor of Meg (who, after my own heart, flew very many hours to shit her brains out in the name of cultural expansion), I give you this Composition Challenge:

Tell me about a time you either pooped yourself or thought you'd poop yourself, threw up or thought you'd throw up, peed your pants, etc. What I want is bodily functions performed in places where people usually pretend they have no bodies except for drinking and flirting. Tell me more.

Mostly so I can feel better about myself.