Little White Liar

If I wear a smoky eye together with dark skinny jeans, my new little boyfriend will say I look like Julie Newmar's Catwoman.

And he doesn't even sound gay about it.

It's a nice day to start again...

Right now, 5,000 miles from here, one of my dearest friends promises her life and love to a man who will never be good enough for her. I'm off to the bar.

Though my legs and feet protest this lifestyle violently, I just made $1700 cash money in one week. 

It's official: waitresses make better livings than doctors of linguistics.

And then suddenly...

I'm in New York. 

Wintery Sydney finally feels its distance...half a world away. My last summer in upstate New York was half a decade ago, and all of the smells from then (and the decade before) blow unchanged in the Hudson Valley.

My mother's house is alive with the racket of brothers, the miniature thunder of puppies underfoot.

Booked

How Lucky Am I?

Last night I wandered into a chain pharmacy and eyed up the selection of makeup removing face wipes. I use these each night to battle waterproof mascara and all of the usual windblown city grit. A 25-piece package of my preferred brand usually teeters around AU$8, but last night they were on promotion -- three packs for $15. Bargain. One minute later, at checkout, a freak note of sadness vibrated through me. I averted my eyes to avoid the humiliation of leaking in the presence of an 18-year-old cashier wearing way too much cologne. "This is it," I thought, clutching 75 pre-moistened towelettes to my stomach with totally unnecessary sentimentality, "I'll never have to buy face wipes in Sydney again." 

This morning I performed one of the most joyous and sorrowful rites of my adventures to date. I bought a one-way ticket out of here. I'm leaving Australia. 

Even the act of typing this takes me back to that register. I feel absurdly sad, considering that it was entirely my decision to end my four-year visa one and a half years early. Leaving Sydney I'm abandoning this: the sturdy paycheck; the beautiful apartment; the canary sunshine; the boisterous clump of friends who stand through my steady flow of off-colour jokes, sudden furies, and rambling affections like a chain of reef stands in the surf. 

Allow yourself to think for one moment about how one decision can alter your destiny for years, and it's enough to stop you from making any sudden moves, ever.

It's true that in running away from Australia I'm running towards my future: a reunion with family members wretchedly missed for over three years, and a welcome stopover on the path toward a British PhD. But I'm vividly aware that once I let go [of all of my accumulated belongings over 32kg, of my proximity to nightcaps with Hanne, of my harbour-view desk and lumbar-support chair, of my half-dozen unrequited mental romances, of my South Pacific tan, of my increasingly mottled accent] the era is over. I'm so scared of that I might someday look back on these reckless years and wonder how stupid a girl can be, rejecting distilled happiness in search of the next unknown...whatever.

How lucky am I? I accidentally stumbled into my salad days, and now I have the audacity to march back out, believing that astounding fortune can spread a little thinner yet.

Facebook, in all of its intelligent evolution, has become gypsy-like.

"Reconnect with her," it chides, under the name of a cousin to whom I owe money and at least a dozen guilty phone calls of invisible nodding and mute tongue-biting.

"12 mutual friends," it's calculated of a past-tense friend, and I wonder without checking if one of them is the boyfriend I slipped away from her on a far-away sun-drenched holiday half a decade ago.

"Say hello," it suggests cryptically, alongside a smiling photo of an acquaintance recently dead and buried, and heedless of well wishes sent too low or too late.

Transmission from Phnom Penh

Twelve hours in this town is enough to put you off humanity entirely.

Holiday cheer

Australia, as a culture, seems to be close to perfecting the work/life balance. Standard issue jobs are on 35-hour work weeks, with four weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid bank holidays, and two weeks of sick allowance, with 17% leave loading. That's two months per year off, with a bonus for taking it. At minimum.

There are small trade-offs. Outside of hospitality workers, all of my friends are done at 5pm sharp, and are free to live their happy lives all evening, every evening. But this means that shopping malls operate from 10am to 5pm, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, with even shorter hours on the weekends. It took some getting used to, saving up all of my material girl urges for Thursday "late night shopping", where stores deign to keep their doors open to an ungodly 9pm. From a sheerly capitalist sense, I don't understand the policy of ensuring that people with full-time jobs (and therefore with command of the sort of cashflow it takes to buy anything in Australia) are almost never able to access the goods you'd like to sell to them. From a sheerly social sense, I'm totally in love with the cultural joie de vivre which kicks off its collective heels at 5pm sharp, and heads straight to the beach for a few solid hours of surf or swim.

All of this changes, of course, for Christmas.

As an American, and a particularly over-anxious one who came of age in the heyday of political correctness, I'm constantly surprised at Australia's complete and dominant Christianity. There are none of the "Happy Holidays!" type of hedges in these parts; "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" is emblazoned on public buses, scrolled across corporate signatures, and shouted from massive baubled trees erected and maintained by the government.

For example, the preparation booklet for those immigrants wanting to take the citizenship test states that

The government in Australia is secular. This means that there is no official national religion.

but also that

Australia has a Judaeo-Christian heritage, and many Australians describe themselves as Christians. Australia has public holidays on Christian days such as Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Christmas Day.

My end-of-year office party was called the "Christmas party", there's a mandatory closure period over Christ's birthday fortnight, and I haven't seen so much as a candle of a menorah since moving abroad. In the billboard boxes outside city churches hang festive signs like, "Don't let Christians put you off Jesus" and "Jesus: Not Available In Stores".

Most shops in the CBD are now open until 10pm, to accommodate the free city circuit bus which picks up and drops off flushed, t-shirted parents fanning themselves in the summer heat. The city centre has become a total mob scene. I walked out of the Sydney City Myer the other day onto Pitt Street Mall, and into a herd of gaping tourists, breathless shoppers, screaming children, honking traffic, and frantic buscars. It sounded like someone laid all of the instruments in an orchestra down on the footpath, and ordered a stampede across it.

You might not know this about me, but I hate crowds. I never go to big music festivals or park concerts or rallies or dance clubs or anywhere that could be classed as a trampling hazard.I pushed my way in a panic toward the nearest sidewalk, my eyes pinned to the ground for any trippy obstacles. I spotted a mother dragging her small boy directly under my flight path. He had the bright and cartoony eyes of a three-year-old full of too much sugar and stimulation. I folded my right arm up at a 90 degree angle to avoid slapping him across the face, and as he passed under me he stretched his hand up and trailed it across the underside of my forearm. I got this flash of trailing my own five-year-old fingers along a chainlink fence to hear the dull percussion of movement. When I turned backwards to stare at him, I saw his head was also turned. With the hand not being vice-gripped by his unnoticing mother, he waved high and cheerful, then vanished into the crowd. For some reason, it made my day.

The weekends have been topping 40C these days, and heatwaves add an extra shimmer to enormous lights displays under constant threat of liquefying. The "traditional Christmas Beach BBQ" will never replace my mental image of a big family roast and the treachery of a snowy drive to get to it, but there is a certain special charm to Christmas in the Antipodes. I've developed a fondness for twee cards featuring Santa in board shorts, pink-cheeked not from cold or spiked egg-nog, but from unrelenting South Pacific heat. There's something to be said for balls-out national abandon during the "Silly Season", with no ornament checked or well-wisher silenced under threat of religious insensitivity. To be quaint, Christmastime in Oz is a party, and everyone is invited.

So...any Scots want to hang out this September?