Little White Liar

Miniature love stories: The Linguist

I first saw him at the same conference, last year. He would have been hard to miss, dressed like he was in tennis whites with a bright red sweater knotted around his shoulders. Young and tall and full of shoulders. He cut paths through huddles of academics in their summer-weight wools; a Wes Anderson hero having wandered into the extras wardrobe department of Good Will Hunting. One of my former lecturers told me who he was and what he did, shrug-shouldered at his niche pop culture dissertation topic, eye-rolled over at his famous arrogance.

I saw him again this year, while both of us were at the registration table for presenters. A balloon full of warm water popped inside my chest cavity. It's much colder this year than last; he was skinnier, paler, dressed like Alfie-era Jude Law. I concentrated on keeping my eyes away from him. In doing so, tracing the areas all around him instead, I noticed everyone else staring.

The first focus speaker was a wash. I ducked out during the question period to waste some time staring into space in the bathroom. When they're clean and empty, I love bathrooms. Standing in one is like standing in a cool, dry swimming pool. After my 'dip' I walked back up the stairs toward coffee reception. Drifting down the otherwise empty stairs, my god, it was him, getting bigger in my field of vision, looking right at me.

"Hey," I offered, in what I hoped was a suitably nonchalant exhale.

"Hi," he said, but that's not all. "Hi," and my full name, and the shock of his hand moving toward me.

What could I do? I shook it. I listened, astounded, as he discussed my research abstract and his interest in seeing me present the full version. I'm sure, readers, that I couldn't help my jaw from falling open a little bit, or my voice squeaking just slightly as I acknowledged the invitation to join his own talk the next day.

As they do, the tomorrow sprouted into the today. They grow up so fast. My presentation was first. Having been one of the first to arrive, I had some time to chat with him before the talk started. I expressed my nerves, my admiration of his dissertation scope, more on my nerves, and my feeling that his outfit was more Justin Timberlake than I would have liked. Within ten minutes, the room was packed. Within a half an hour, my talk was over, and my first unscripted glance up was met with his smiling face. I experienced a  rush of relief and sudden, intense, self-critical nausea.

His talk, of course, was highly polished. The slides were minimalist, the notes were all in his head, the style was engaging and natural. The audience collectively leaned into him until the projection went dark. I felt like Mandy Moore at a Beatles concert.

At the closing drinks, I hung close to my former lecturers, swigging champagne and laughing at the concept of academic celebrity. ("Oh my god look, there's MICHAEL HALLIDAY.") I found myself chatting to him again before too long, and then, less than an hour later, being steered around the room and being introduced to the who's who in critical linguistics. At his introductions, solemn shakes and business cards were folded into my hands. Academics wanted to know where I planned to take my PhD. If I planned on publishing this year. Whether I'd considered their own department.

It was an act of such profound philanthropy I found myself grinning puppily at him over the bobbing heads of the more-famous and better-connected, as we all shuffled outbound and homeward.

How long?

I get it: my clothes are weird, and I talk funny.

I could perform the first 10 minutes of any conversation on complete autopilot: Oh yes that is an accent you detect. New York. Oh, I don't watch much sport. Oh, I don't remember that episode. Facebook tests say I'm a total Charlotte; the Seinfeld diner is different inside. Actually I prefer Sydney. About two and a half years. Working and studying. I know, I'm quite the busy bee. I'm going to go find my friends now. Nice meeting you!

I have been having the same conversation, on average three times a day, for two and a half years. Bill Murray had nowhere near the amount of goddamn saintly patience that glows from every filthy pore of each traveler you have ever met.

Even this is bearable compared to what I am about to reveal as, hands-down, the worst part of living outside of one's hometown. This is worse than being daily subjected to someone's sloppy rendition of Fran Drescher's New Yawker; worse than having consecutive presidents openly and even gleefully bashed for my benefit; worse even than the inability to secure a single combination of fucking chocolate and peanut butter for less than specialty shop $1/1g prices (SERIOUSLY how hard is it).

My patience is up on the constant, repetitive, grating daily interrogation about the Next Big Step. Everyone. Everyone demands to know what my plan is. It doesn't matter if I've known someone years or minutes, or if I see them once a day or once a year. Americans want to know when I intend to go home. Australians want to know how much longer I intend to despoil their blessed country (free of racism and corrupt educational practices and ludicrous immigration policies and don't you ever fucking forget it). Foreigners want to know which airline sent me the latest e-ticket, and whether I've bothered with a return flight.

I swear the entire planet is my dead Jewish grandmother, hook-nosed and peering over my shoulder with the concern and the clucking. It's enough to give Ghandi a major anxiety disorder. 

Of course everyone means well. Or at least they only mean to express curiousity, and it's my major malfunction to interpret this as my gap years' Spanish Inquisition. But I have never lived life with a cut-and-clear aim, and I believe more than ever that if you trust the universe enough to close your eyes and hold out your hand, you always get something that you want or need.

My public service for the week is to call a moratorium on the old wanderlust probe. From now on I'm walking away from any conversation that makes me feel like a 16-year-old gaping at my mother from across the kitchen table. You should, too. Just because we have the audacity to live where we choose and try to do whatever makes us happy doesn't mean we have to constantly be made to answer for ourselves. 

And that's that.

Everyone I know

It seems like everyone I know has ended up with the wrong person. Ever feel that way?

I'm a Wanderer

The thing about wanderlust, romantic as it may be, is that it's a mental illness like any other. Closest probably to manic depression.

For long stretches I'm deliriously happy. I'm a goldfish. I forget there is, or was ever, anything outside of my tank. Meditatively, I go to the office and scoop up the same stones as always, forever depositing them on the furthest wall. I swim drunkenly through the same plaster castles, over the usual model treasure chest, along the always walls (barely bumping). I stare placidly into the eyes of my comrades, wanting nothing more than is given to me.

I told Lauren about my plans to move to Germany after last semester, to become an English teacher, practice another language, and possibly get deep into some crazy sexual kink. When the time came, I was just like all the others, too scared of "The Economy" to take the leap, quit my job, run away. Lauren went on ahead without me, living out my dream. I can't fault her; it was a good one. But she didn't settle in Berlin, or get a job teaching, or get any job at all. She backpacked around Europe until her money ran out, recalling her many affairs and misadventures to me periodically over Skype. She'll be home one week too late for my birthday at the rented lakehouse on the Central Coast. Just when I'm starting to feel sad about not being in Europe, about being one man down for the slumber weekend, she says: "Summer is coming. We'll throw beachy parties when I get back." and just like that, I'm happy again.

I've become as easy to please as a toddler given an injection and then a lollipop.

Sydney is lovely as ever. Spring is here, and with it the all-permeating smell of honeysuckle and jasmine, the sound of traffic mixed in with tropical birdsong. Some days (most days) I can walk down the street and hit a magical stride - the music through my headphones, the tap of my sandaled feet, the strobes of orange sunlight jumping in and out of periphery, the content feeling of a full stomach framed by outfit that's neither too constricting or too unflattering...all of these things line up and my chest feels too full of it. 

On the last night of my tutor training, the Russian TESOL teacher pulls me aside. I've been demanding straight answers from her all night, and pulling nothing but exasperated sighs and wishy-washy generalizations. I figure, she'll hate me, but at least I'll be awesome at my job. Anyway, I'm used to being the challenging student. It's this very quality that makes me believe I'll be good at dealing with challenging students once I'm a professor myself - I relate to the idea of sinking your teeth in and shaking an idea until the guts pop out. I try and preempt the confrontation with a sort of apology. "Sorry if I was a little aggressive in there. I just really find that I work better when I understand exactly what is expected of me." Lana (that's her name here because Australians have trouble getting the 'Svet' sound off their teeth) looks taken aback. "I wanted to say I appreciate your attempts to make me clarify," Lana says. "It's easy for me to skim over ideas because I am so used to them." I don't know what to say, so I smile and flutter my hands and look around to make sure that nobody is witnessing how horrible I am at taking compliments. Lana continues, "You remind me of another American girl I know. Always with such a big smile and kind eyes." These things to describe the wanderer just over two years removed from a scowling New York. Astonishing.

I've stopped smoking pot. I've stopped crying in front of my doctors and bosses; in fact, I barely cry at all anymore. I've lost weight. I've gone full vegetarian. I've finished a degree, and with it, I'm doing some good in the world. I am at once the hub and just another spindle in a circle of friends who are better-suited to me than at any other point in my life.

But for all of the ups, there are always the downs. I find myself falling into the old habits. Have a particularly bad day at work, spend an hour building fantasy itineraries on the websites of every major airline in the world. Suffer some petty heartbreak, use and abuse the next bright-eyed teenager offering to spend his hard-earned retail job dollars on my overpriced cocktails. Get disappointed by a friend, and systematically extinguish them from my life. Find myself alone on a night when I wanted to not be alone, and use those hours bitterly dreaming about someplace more foreign and more full of activities that haven't been done to death.

Lately I've been revisiting all of the pieces that used to speak to me. I rented Eternal Sunshine, Pieces of April, Garden State, Amelie, Closer, and others featuring the same "I was lost but now am found" heroine. I can't see myself in Clementine, April, Sam, Amelie, or Jane. Does that mean I'm even more lost, or completely found?

I've become excruciatingly aware that starting a PhD means a three-year commitment to one place, one discipline, one good idea. I was a teenager the last time I was capable of that level of dedication. I find myself fixating on the 10 months between now and then, too certain that they constitute the last pages in this chapter. I hear that a friend was happy for a time in Namibia. I hear that job prospects are still good in Japan. I hear that a boy in New York is holding a torch and I am tempted to go and spend a reckless weekend snuffing it out. I hear that ticket prices to Argentina are in free-fall, and I picture myself taking a half a year to practice my Spanish, learn to salsa, and drink wine with flowers woven into my hair.

What would you do? In the face of massive change, would you cradle your existing happiness for as long as possible? Or would you strike out toward something new and risky, shucking off your old life at the first chance? What kind of punter are you?

Returned to sender

Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. It's been so many events since I've done this; I don't know where to start. Stream of consciousness style recap it is.

I finished my final papers, then I finished my thesis, thereby finishing the semester, and then all of a sudden I'd finished my Masters. To celebrate, I threw a fancy dress party. As usual, the pre-party was the highlight of the evening. Want to guess the theme?

At the event itself, I had a (very public) moment with one of my best friends and ever since I've been oscillating between pretending it never happened and plotting ways to make it happen again. So far I'm able to report that he is amenable to private dinner dates and beer-drinking way too late on weeknights, though less forthcoming with any anticipated grab-and-ravish techniques.

Frankly, the older I get (and the more of them I've seen naked), the less I understand men.

Anyway, with all the time I've been saving not going to classes anymore, and not devoting to a meaningful romantic relationship, I've been able to travel. My best friend (and former foreign roommate) took two weeks off from winter in Sydney to whip through the tropics and deserts of the Northern Territory. I learned that Darwin was bombed out by the same guys who did Pearl Harbor. Were rescued from near-drowning by shy American Air Force pilots skilled not only in getting sweet placements in Japan, but also in scooping their countrywoman up by the hips and setting her down safely in a trough of the violent wave pool.

We saw jumping crocodiles. Wild camels. Dingos (none with babies). Emus scavenging in the open bed of a ute parked for fueling. Drove 1000km on the left-hand side, with nothing for company but blood-red earth, the blazing winter sun, and the whip of music and wind through the hair. We saw, for the first time, a fully realized Western caste system. Wherein Aborigines squatted in cracked riverbeds surrounded by bags of belongings, passed endlessly by European descendents in their new cars and shiny atheism. We wondered whether they feel jealousy or pity.

I met a Prince Harry look-alike in a dirty pub in Alice Springs, and one week after kissing the redhead teenager over a wet bar, was confined to bed with glandular fever and ordered off solids for the better part of a month. Worth it.

When at least we reached the middle of the country, there it was. Bigger and more red than is possible even inside the mind. Sat in the centre of a landscape that seems to hold its breath in reverance, so quiet is a sky without clouds, a desert without sand, a habitat so inhospitable that nothing could be expected to endure except a monolith.

Uluru. Nearly the opposite of the Statue of Liberty in every possible way. I'm still constantly surprised at how far I've gone.

We had a silver service dinner our first night, and underneath a new moon and more constellations than I've ever seen in any sky, we saw planets and shooting stars and felt both unimaginably small and blessed. The strangers on my right happened to be wandering Americans, and when they came to Sydney a few days later I made myself available for eating-and-drinking tours, and when they left, they took my full contact details and a small piece of my sentimental little heart. After two and a half years, I finally miss my fellow 'Mericans.

Spring has arrived in Sydney. I'm grossly happy. More soon.

Yours,

Amanda Rose

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...