It's a funfair!

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If you'd walked into our office today, you would've been a little bewildered.

As it is, half the office wears smart casual (veering on casual) while the other half wears smart casual (veering on smart). But add to that:

• Ross the corporate masseuse working his magic on one of my workmates in the back half of the most formal room of the office: the boardroom;
• Our boss's young daughters sitting opposite each another, hands cupped under their chins, watching "It's Complicated" from the projector screen in the front half of said boardroom;
  
• Mr Funky Glasses wandering languidly down the corridor and stopping to talk to Miss DB, arm casually slung over the partition;
• Miss 90210 searching for tea;
• Miss Tiny scurrying down the corridor with her ruffle skirt bouncing in sync with her scurry as she hurries to meet her massage timeslot;
  
• Me munching on Corn Thins;
  
• Mr Russia and Juy Pee congregating in our Pod of Awesomeness to go out for a smoke; and
  
• Miss K Kaif swearing at the new printer

and you pretty well have a fun fair.

Ahoy over there!

Every night when Miss DB and I leave work at the same time, we stumble to the station talking non-stop, knocking into each other and laughing a lot of the time. Everything seems so funny when you're leaving work. We zoom through the ticket gates and wave each other goodbye:

Okay bye! She waves and gives her delightfully broad grin and heads to her platform

Okay see you tomorrow! I shout over my shoulder and run to my platform

We may as well be saying hi how you going? because most of the time if we have time to spare before our trains arrive, one of us calls the other. We're both on Vodaphone and it's free so we stand there facing each other from our respective platforms and continue the conversation. A large portion of this conversation is taken up with me giving her a blow by blow account of the people she's standing next to, and whether or not they've figured out that I'm talking to her. I look directly at her and gesticulate wildly to give them clues that we're actually talking to each other. Similarly, she accompanies all her statements with lots of facial expression and hand movements- the kind of things you don't do when you're talking to someone who's not directly opposite you.

Sometimes I see people figure it out. They look at me, then at Miss DB, then back again. Then they turn to their friend and murmur something to them. Then their friend looks at me, then at Miss DB and then at me again- then grin- all proud-like: that's right buddies, you cracked the code!

Will the novelty of this ever wear off? Unlikely.

Do I recommend it to all you folk out there? Absolutely. It's enormously fun, silly and cool.

Living life on the edge...

This morning as I was walking to work I saw the coolest/stupidest/riskiest thing I've seen in a while. This cyclist was holding onto the rail sticking out from the back of the truck.

The truck was going at about 50km/hour. The cyclist had his feet propped up on the bike frame and the pedals were whizzing around on their own. He was crusing with his other hand casually holding onto the bike handle.

Both me and the man walking next to me did a massive double take and watched him all the way down Elizabeth St.

Wowsers

Off-kilter chronicles cont...

So my off-kilter week continues. The day draws to a close and I'm rushing for the train- 1 minute until my train arrives. I'm stomping the footpath like there's no tomorrow. When I get to the escalator there's a guy standing in the middle of the step- I can't get past:

"Scuse me please" I pant

"Oh yes, okay!" he muffles and shuffles to the left.

I don't know how I was walking or what I did but somehow my foot twists and I find myself on the way to airborne and on the way to face first into the escalator steps.

"Omg" I hear a lady gasp.

"Oh dear oh dear" I hear the man I was trying to sidle past, say.

My non-existent reflexes kick in and somehow I grab the black rubber side guard. My legs shudder into the splits across three steps. My calf scrapes down the corner of the stairs. The hand that grabs the side guard is also holding my little Harrods bag which is housing 2 books: "Eat Pray Love" as well as "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work." The former falls out and into the gap between the side guard and the wall. It's stubbornly wedged. I watch it go past as I try and regain my footing. The man who I was trying to past gets to the bottom before me and keeps trying to go up the going down escalators to retrieve my book:

"No, no, I'll go up and come back down again and push it down with my other book!" I say

He nods and agrees and the book is retrieved. I tell him it's not his fault, it's mine- I'm famous for my dodgy sense of balance and he smiles and hopes I'm okay.

As I stumble to the train my legs are all jittery, bouncing around because of all the adrenaline pumping through me. Then everything starts to hurt. I stretch my opaque stockings to see if there's been any damage and I can see a three pronged gash down my shin.

Thank god for my stockings, is all I can say. Imagine if it'd been summer and I was wearing nothing but a skirt!

Off kilter

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Things this week are a little off-kilter.

Yesterday, while I was flexing my cooking muscles I dropped a plate and it smashed onto the tile floor into a million tiny pieces. I spent the next 20 minutes vacuuming all the microscopic shards and hoping that no one would somehow get a sliver of porcelain stuck in their foot. In Korea, dropping crockery is a sign of bad luck. And so I headed out after lunch driving tentatively and hoping that the smashed up plate wouldn't translate into a bingle on the road. Thankfully, it didn't.

Then while I was on the train going home after catching up with Mussus D, JT and O, I was flipping through the photos on my camera when I heard someone walk up the stairs and stop in front of me. I looked up and saw an eery looking man eyeing my camera:

Hello. What's your name?

he said.

In a moment of mindless reflex, I stupidly said Hello back before finding my marbles and walking away through to the other carriage. In my haste, I dropped my phone and he tried to reach for it as I went to pick it up:

You dropped your phone.

he said. I got out of there faster than you could say "creepy guy with the creepy stare and the creepy observations".

Then today, somehow, somewhere along the way I dropped my weekly train ticket as I was going home. There were still two days left on it. It occurred to me that things weren't going all that smoothly this week- it's not like things were going badly, just a little bumpy.

I hope the tide turns tomorrow- maybe it's already started to turn: Miss Tiny found my train ticket on top of the watercooler. But that was after I'd already bought a new ticket to get home.

Still, better than nothing... Off kilter I tell you, it's all a little off.

Slow as

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Yesterday was such a slow day. I had zero plans and struggled to find something to do. I redecorated my room, brushed my hair (fyi I never brush my hair; I just smooth it out with the palms of my hands like a brushless tiger) and did the laundry.

Then 11 am hit and I yelled: Snap out of it ! before putting on some presentable clothes and heading to the shops. I ran the usual errands- Priceline, Asian Grocer, Woolies, oovie vending machine and JB Hi Fi.

True to my promise that I will one day be a good driver, I shopped around for the most helpful GPS system that wouldn't cost me my gammy knee and left shoe. Did you know that some GPS systems have lane changing instructions and also tell you to turn left "at the petrol station" and not just in "120 metres"? Now they are my kind of GPS. Half my struggle is trying to estimate distances while I change lanes!

The JB guy was too busy for his boots to serve- so I left all sweaty, claustrophobe-d and empty handed (doesn't JB make you feel like that?). I'm thinking I'll go today when I return my oovie dvd- The Young Victoria, which I watched in bed on my portable dvd player. I was that lazy that I couldn't be bothered to sit myself in front of a proper tv to watch a movie which would have looked 10 times better on a big screen than my 20cm by 15cm square. In any case, it was a wonderful movie. Romantic, bits of scandal and visually pretty stunning.

On the other end of the east coast of Oz, Man from Mars was watching his own oovie dvd- some Mike Moore doco about Capitalism. He kept saying that it was "interesting!" and I kept saying that it was too serious. Who would forgo romance and scandal for realism and insight? Really, who would do that??

Bus driver banter

In the evenings I catch the bus home.

The bus drivers know me now. On Tuesdays, there's a smiley Japanese driver who kindly takes a shortcut and stops right in front of my driveway. He always grins joyfully and warns me to "mind your step!" as I get off blindly into the dark.

Today, there is a new bus driver who tells me that he has never done this route before. As the last passenger before me, gets off, he engages in the usual conversation:

Driver: So you're not having a big night out tonight?
Me (at the risk of sounding like a total nerd geriatric): Nah, I can't be bothered. I just wanna go home and watch Masterchef
Driver (not too surprised): Fair enough! Yeah, I'm really getting into Masterchef too
Me: Yeah I love it! Everyone cries and makes good food! But you wouldn't get to watch it if your driving your bus at night, right?
Him: Nah, I don't usually do this route- but I find that I miss 2 episodes on average a week.
Me: You can watch it online!
Him (dubious): Yeah, I'm not too up to speed with watching it online!

And then I asked him to stop at my driveway and he chuckled- maybe because he's not officially my chauffeur and you're not meant to ask the driver to drop you off at your door.

I thanked him and told him to watch it online and he promised that he'd give it a go.

Bus drivers are so underrated.

Happy birthday your royal highness...

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It was the Queen's birthday long weekend and I headed down to Melbourne for a mini rendevous with Man from Mars.

It was an excellent weekend full of renting $2.95 dvds from oovie vending machines (Up in the Air is such a top film; Sherlock Holmes also very enjoyable); fine Man from Mars company and Archery Wii.

The hightlight though?

Having lunch on the Tram Restaurant- a beautifully restored old school tram equipped with a tiny gully for the tram chef, antique lamps and velvety tunes of decades gone by. I waved gaily (like a nerd) at pedestrians (who occasionally kindly waved back) and everyone on board was in stitches as the waiter (Steve) impressed us with his quick humour, sharp wit and attentive service.

Man from Mars and I grinned like happy larries the entire trip- it was romantic; a slow meander through town where you had a chance to sit still, be spoilt with simple tasty food and enjoy the cosy warmth of the golden lighting, the sound of laughter and the exchanging of stories.

When we got off the tram it was like stepping back into a different country- cold, windy, grey and cloudy-- people running around like headless chooks (my year 4 teacher's favourite turn of phrase) at Crown, the crazy sound of the polkies against the swoosh of the entrance waterfall. We looked back at the tram and vowed we'd do it again.

The next day I flew back to Sydney and went over to my sister's place to spend the night. She's living in Glebe and we watched Masterchef while eating vegetarian moussaka and a second course of lebanese bread, hommous and babaganoush. I found a super long red curly hair in my moussaka courtesy of my sister's house mate, and after my initial recoil, my sister made me focus on the fact that her housemate washes her hair more religiously than I change my bedsocks (well they're bed socks!). So, I conceded that the hair wasn't so bad and I tried not to think about it too much...

Another long weekend's come and gone and now the next one won't be until October. Why, creator of NSW calendars, why??

In other news, work is going well. I love listening to guys talking about the issues they're having with their girlfriends. I don't mean serious break-up worthy issues; I mean guys feeling completely bamboozled, hard done by and unhappy because their girlfriends are going off at them when they absolutely haven't done anything wrong. The number of times I've said "Look, your girlfriend probably wasn't even mad at you! She was probably just taking it out on you cos she could!" is more than I can count, and the insight makes me cringe at the number of times I've ticked off at Man from Mars purely because he was there to take my wrath, and by the way, take it in a classy way. If I were him, I would've blasted his ears off right back, but 99% of the time, Man from Mars lets me chuck a sook, calmly tells me that I'm obviously stressed about X, Y and Z and then proceeds to allow me to hang up so that no further damage is done.

I'm also enjoying D & M emails I'm exchanging with a friend from my old work- Miss Glam-ela. She's super tall, glamorous and wise and I always come away from those emails feeling like I've learnt something valuable. On Thursday, we were sharing our deepest fears. Hers is public speaking- a mildly annoying issue given that she's a lawyer and has to give presentations every so often. Mine is driving- again, a mildly annoying issue given that most people compare it to walking and really, it's not that hard. Plus, am I going to walk everywhere my entire life???

Voicing a fear is cathartic. Admitting a fear to someone else who offers their own fear in return is a hundred times better. I think we both inspired each other to do whatever the hell we need to do to get over them. I entered the weekend with a renewed enthusiasm to drive as often as I can and she signed up for an introductory Toast Masters meeting. A fear is after all, something that's become disproprionately problematic because someone else has (somewhere along the way) made you think it was scary. That, or something happened when you were little and it's made you insecure about whatever it is, ever since.

Everyone has fears, but like I said to Miss Glam-ela, most of the time you forget, because everyone comes across so damn confident all the time.

Thems my profound words for the week.

You snooze, you dooze like a doozy

This morning I fell asleep on the train. As the train mosied along, I dreamt that I was watching Oprah on tv. It must have been around 1995 because Oprah had her old short hairstyle and not the voluminous curly style she wears nowadays. She was taking her camera crew around Coles and stared directly into the camera:

This pasta is 10 cents! Imagine how many packets of pasta we can buy!

she declared.

Even as I dreamt, it occurred to my that pasta never would have cost 10 cents, even in 1995, right?

And as I considered this as I dreamt, for some reason, some how, I twitched (or more like hit out) involuntarily in my sleep. Poor lady sitting next to me copped a punch in her right boob.

I woke up with a start and muffled: "Oh! Sorry!"

She shifted uncomfortably and kept reading her John Grisham.

I shrank back down into my seat and stared firmly out the window for the rest of the ride.

Like a fly in my eye!

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Last week, Miss K Kaif and I were walking up Liverpool St when she began recounting the story of her sister falling asleep on her shoulder during Wog Boy 2; not because she was bored, but because she got tired. She had mentioned the fact that her sister tends to fall asleep during movies on a previous occasion, and while I was laughing at her story I chimed in "Ohhh cos your sister always falls a-sleep!!"

The combined effect of me laughing hysterically while I said this, walking wonky because I was laughing and my inability to form words properly because my mouth was hanging wide open, meant that my top and bottom teeth didn't connect properly when I said the 's' in "asleep". The result:

Ascthchleep!

Followed by: a cascade of spit spraying out in a perfect upside down parabola. To my mortification, one particularly huuuge globule lands exactly and quite delicately on Miss K Kaif's eye lash.

There is a momentary stillness as I realise where it has landed.

Miss K Kaif recoils and stares upwards struggling to identify the weird white globule that's clouding her vision- bewildered:

What is that, a fly?????

And then I can hardly stop laughing as I tell her no, no it isn't a fly, it is my spit and yes, I'm gross and I'm very very sorry to have done this.

Rather heroically ( I thought), Miss K Kaif takes it all in her stride, wipes it off with her thumb and index finger and we laugh all the way up the street. She keeps saying how she was surprised because the "fly" came out of no where and she had thought it had flown into her eye.

I keep wondering how much more perfectly I could have timed my shameful display of long distance spitting and consider that even if Miss K Kaif had been just half a step away from me, the spit ball would have missed her face and landed on the ground- no one would've known.