Every day on my walk home from the train station I walk past this window. It’s just an ordinary shop front between a cafe and a Malaysian takeaway but I love it. At the moment the artist is asking passers-by to text their answers to his question: what would you like to leave behind? Then he writes them on some kind of bundle and puts them all in the window. It’s interesting to read how people interpret the question and choose to answer. “Nothing”, “a man who abuses me” and “the ATO” for example.
Aside from its artistic merit, I love this window because it reminds me of my friends. For the final year of my degree, along with the essays and the dissertation (”Is naturalism an excuse for voyeurism in contemporary performance?”) I had to create, perform and review a theatrical composition with a group of my friends; the feared and awesome Final Year Project. I worked with Elsa, Liccy and our friend Carolyn to put on a performance the likes of which had never been seen before. Our idea eventually boiled down to shoes as cultural mirrors - an idea I have seen in various settings since - and we worked our asses off to make it memorable. Carolyn lived in a converted shop and we created a false wall in the window to give us a display space just like the one I walk past on my way home. For three months we created weekly installations on our theme by juxtaposing different shoes and cultural images, before the final week when we staged an eight-hour performance art piece bringing all the static stuff together into one big, crazy, beatnik, guerilla-style performance. It was the talk of the city. There’s no room for false modesty here: we worked bloody hard and I’m still proud of the results.
During that FYP I spent hours, days and weeks with the three girls and their housemates, Monkey, Pippa and Karen; all of whom became fantastic friends. We would work in the mornings, afternoons or evenings, drink wine, make tea, watch daytime tv while we waited for papier maché to set, sleep over and have cocktails. We lamented our shitty love lives, drank like fish, got into trouble, danced like fools and laughed and laughed and laughed.
When I’m walking home from work, seeing this window reminds me of our window, and the friends I made and love.
One month on and whenever people ask me about how I am or how we are doing, I have a few stock answers that seem to cover the situation to everyone’s satisfaction. If you get one of these answers when you ask me any of the following, here’s what you can read into it.
Q: How are you getting on living together?
A: Oh, great. We didn’t fall out or anything, we’re just not going out any more.
Means: Fine. It’s like all the best bits of a our relationship with none of the tension. It’s a little weird because some times I find myself wondering why it couldn’t have been more like this when we were together, and reminding myself that we aren’t together for those very reasons. It’s like the anthropic principle of relationships: the answers you seek are the very reasons you can ask the question in the first place. Why do we live in a region of space perfect for life? Because if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be any life. Why do I have an emotional war going on inside me? Because you’re human. Suck it up.
Q: How are you managing? You seem to be holding up well.
A: Yeah, good thanks.
Means: I am in swinging brick mode because daily life does not allow me to fall apart and I do not allow myself to wallow or navel-gaze. To admit that emotionally I am up and down like a bride’s nightie may not seem like a victory to you, but it certainly feels like defeat to me. I am holding up well over all, but I have my low points. I just choose not to show it.
Q: Are you still friends? I’m glad your friendship survived.
A: Me too. He’s still my best friend.
Means: Me too. He’s still my best friend. I really am extremely lucky to have come out of this with a friend like James. Anyone who can refrain from judging you and wish you well, even when you split up with them, is a priceless wonder to be treasured. Hence the uncertainty, second guessing and general confusion. I’m certain that we’ve done the right thing, it’s just hard to see it all the time.
I’ve been single for almost a month now and it’s inevitable that James and I would eventually start wade out into the hunting grounds of life and start dating other people. (It’s only been a month so perhaps ‘dating’ is overstating a little, but it will do for now.) It is a little weird to know that James is out seeing other men but I’m kind of used to the idea now and even (tentatively) starting to talk about who we are each seeing in an effort to be open with one another. Good friends are honest with one another, after all. However, moving on presents its own problems and I have a big one. My name is Sven, and I’m a reboundaholic.
What I don’t know about rebound isn’t worth knowing. I’ve rebounded on girls after splitting up with a girl; I’ve rebounded on boys after splitting up with a boy. I’ve rebounded on a boy after splitting up with a girl, and the other way round. Every combination you can imagine I’ve taken out for a test drive, raced up a mountain road and wrapped around a tree. I’ve done it enough times to spot that I’ve got a problem. I was always the one doing the dumping so, for me, it was never about getting back what I had lost or fear of being alone. For me it’s a desperate attempt to prove that I can get it right. It’s insidious. It’s like playing old vinyl on a new record player: it may look shiny and wonderful, but the groove doesn’t change and I end up with the same old tunes every time.
That’s not to say that rebound is all bad. It’s a great excuse to do things I wouldn’t normally because I’m “having a hard time of it at the moment” (and by ‘things’, I mean parties and people). But it’s not fun forever, or for everyone. It can be pretty awkward to regain perspective and then have to ditch your new friends because you realise that you want to keep your job and liver functions.
Despite all this, is a rebound ever not a rebound? In my attempts to enjoy a ‘controlled rebound’, I have been quite honest and told people that I’m not looking for a relationship. Does it still count as a rebound if you’re just friends who also sleep together from time to time? When does it cross the line from a bit of fun to something that will involve an awkward conversation later? I’ll tell you when: it’s when you start asking questions like these. When you start wondering if it’s gone too far, it’s already gone too far. Knowing it’s a rebound doesn’t mean it isn’t a rebound. If it walks like a duck and it sounds like a duck you might as well call it a duck, because you’ll never turn it into a swan.
Since moving to Australia I’ve been lucky enough to avoid having to go to the doctor for anything, but there are some pretty vicious colds going around at the moment (apart from the swine flu, of course) and last week I had a few days off work while I sweated out a particularly nasty bug. I had to go to the doctor to certify I was actually ill, and since it’s not free here (unlike the UK with the fabulous, wonderful NHS) I was determined to get everything I could for my $30.
Paying for your doctor’s appointment does seem to get you a better service, it must be said. As much as I think I shouldn’t have to shell out every time I’m sick, the doctor does take his time with you rather than hustling you out the door like UK doctors often do. I got a sick note for my cold after a thorough examination and interrogation about my symptoms; a good look at my nose after a 20-stone guy smashed into it at rugby a few weeks ago (it took me three weeks to notice that it has changed shape - thankfully it’s not broken); and the usual run of tests for STIs and the like. They’re a pain in the ass but they’ve got to be done. Now I’m a single boy the general advice is to get everything checked out so while I was there I took the opportunity to get everything checked out.
Compared to the UK, sexual health testing in Australia is fantastic. I don’t know how the UK government can claim anything but total failure on this front: my last test in the UK was fine, but the care was atrocious. The results take three weeks to come back and they only call you if there’s something wrong; essentially you spend 21 days worrying every time the phone rings. In Australia the tests were back in two days and they even checked my existing vaccinations for free, too. No long waits on the edge of your seat waiting for the all clear. I never take any risks, of course, but no matter how safe you think you are there’s always a chance that something could have gone wrong and no matter how slim, that chance always looks massive right before you get the results. Thankfully, the results were as expected: everything came back clear.
The only damn cheek about the whole thing was having to pay for a second appointment to get my results. $30 for a five minute all clear and a prescription for a Hep B vaccination booster? Outrageous! Still, money well spent to get the good news. I guess I can live with that.
Following my review of Season 1 several of you told me via comments, e-mails and tweets that Season 2 was more of the same, but that Seasons 3 and onward are where the action really begins. I can believe it. If the first season was a collection of “let’s sit here and wait for trouble to find us” stories, then season 2 was a radical departure where the characters decided that they were big and ugly enough to go out and find their own damn pickles to get into. And so they do, trekking out in their little Runabouts* and get into all kinds of strife that they manage to wrap up neatly in just over 40 minutes.
While the weekly “set up, shit hits fan, more shit followed by explosions and resolution” format doesn’t change, there is some nice character development (such as a peek at Kira’s history as a freedom fighting terrorist, and the start of a slow road to the discovery of Odo’s unknown origins) and the writers clearly understand that the traditional Start Trek weekly drama isn’t going to work for very long here. The seeds of a the major series nemesis are sown subtly throughout the episodes - the idea of an awful enemy being somewhere ‘out there’ - and the tension with the existing baddies is also gently notched up. When the last episode is relatively light on action (except for blowing up the Enterprise Odyssey) it makes up for it with the threat of bigger things to come, and that is by far the most rewarding thing about the series.
On to Series 3 which, I believe, features the arrival of the Defiant. I can’t wait!
*Runabouts are shuttles on steroids, and seriously over-rated. Apparently they are strong enough to fight off really bad guys while the galaxy class starship they are defending gets blown to shit, but fragile enough to get blown out of the sky by every other tin-pot aggressor they run into for the rest of the series. And there’s no consistent scale for these things, either. In DS9 they can hold 200-odd people, but in The Next Generation they’re barely big enough to hold a tea party for Picard and his band of luckless command staff.
