My People

There are a lot of people in my life, friends, family, colleagues, my shoe man, my personal trainer, the good breakfast guy....well you get the picture. Not all of them are close to me, but they all make up the human landscape of my life.

Did you make anyone's day brighter today?

I don't think I did, or at least I didn't do it consciously.

Mid-20's Urban Disconnection Angst

Back when my grandparents were my age, life was a nice structured combination of social institutions that formed the framework for how you behaved, thought, dressed, who your friends would be, what you'd cook, where you'd live, who you'd date and when you'd get married. OK, so my grandma was 25 in the 1940's, I might be stretching it a bit, but there was a lot more social structure back then.

My parents are members of the Bellerive Yacht Club in Tasmania, and it has been a major part of their lives as long as I can remember. The Club provides its members with a marina, a bar, footy tipping, family nights, all sorts of functions and generally a place and a group where members feel they 'belong'. Even now (7 years after moving interstate) I can walk into the Club and people will know me and say g'day. As a child, the Club determined a lot of the structure of my life - Wednesday night twilight races, Friday night dinners, Saturday and Sunday races, countless Mother's Day lunches, my Father's 50th birthday party, my Grandfather's wake was held there and his picture still hangs in the hallway, and most importantly I learnt never wear a hat in a bar (or else you'll have to shout the whole bar)!

One of the biggest changes I experienced when moving states was the loss of social institutions/groups to guide my way. I was away from my family, school group, my pony club, my parent's yacht club and everything I knew. While it was great that this new beginning meant I had to work out who I was, this authenticity came at a cost - the comfort and security of belonging to a community and understanding the prescribed norms. I think this angst might be true for many of my generation who move out of home and away from everything they know, every generation has had to go out and forge it's place in the world, but the disconnect is far greater now - we're not in Kansas anymore!

In an attempt to appease my fears at being totally out of place and out of order, last year I signed up for 'ettiquette school', which is apparently enjoying a significant rise in enrollments - possibly due to this 'disconnection angst'. Thankfully, etiquette school simply confirmed I was OK, instead of telling me I was horribly badly mannered!

Over the past few years I've created my own network of social groups to form the framework for my life - my 'urban family', work groups, volunteer groups, steak night groups, girl's night groups, meditation group and all of these help to give my life structure. Many of my friends are part of sporting groups, book clubs, volunteer with community groups or surf clubs, but it seems the future of the organised social club is being replaced with more informal social groupings. Can facebook replace a yacht club ? Can a group of people you meet because they hang out at the same bar replace life-long friendships with school-mates (in my case, yes)?

If you're reading this blog and you're not yet a 'follower' you'd better join up (all the cool kids are doing it), you can find the follow button at the left hand side of this column.

The Community Cup, or why UDLs are a bad idea

The Community Cup is one of my favourite days of the year and yesterday's game was no let down. There was sun, mud, dogs, kids, football, snags and lots and lots of UDL cans (last night in a sugar-induced bout of insomnia I calculated I'd consumed 1530 calories worth of UDL Vodka Passionfruit cans....I don't know what that means, but I'm guessing its bad).

My highlights of the day included:

The sun - I love Melbourne winters!

The mud - lots of people got very, very muddy

Using public toilets and not dying...yet.

Meeting Tex Perkins...and offering him money to sing 'This is not the Way Home', repeatedly...he politely declined, repeatedly.

Finding the Rockdogs mascots uniform unattended...need I say more

The football - I think there was some of that too...

This guy's jumper:

What are you doing this Sunday?

This Sunday is the Annual Community Cup - a football game held at Elsternwick Park to raise money for charity. It's a great day and I can't wait to get my blankie out and drink a few Melbourne Bitter stubbies (only for charities sake of course) - go Rock Dogs!!

http://www.communitycup.org.au/index.html

25, I guess that's kind of grown up.

I've reached an age where people have stopped saying 'oh, that's so young' when they discover it. For the first time in my adult life I'm no longer the youngest member of my social group, children refer to me as 'the lady' not 'the girl', and I've also become quite taken with the idea of spending whole weekends on the couch instead of out on the turps. It appears the world is trying to tell me I'm an adult.

In an attempt to embrace this I've tried volunteering for charity - you know, do the community minded, socially responsibility thing...it didn't really stick. It was rewarding and all (if you consider being sworn at by junkies, proposed to by hobos and pooed at by children rewarding), but it turns out staying home was just as rewarding.

I also tried taking night classes, apparently that's what adults do. After 7 weeks of millinery I ended up with one semi wearable hat and glue everywhere. I went to one class of my six week silversmithing course, realized it involved getting my hands dirty and never went back. Thankfully my adult ballet course was cancelled before it began.

Other people, upon noticing my responsible adult status rather misguidedly left me in charge of their children. This has never ended well, children can smell my fear much like a horse can.

In the last two months i've decided to take it right back to 'adult basics' and focus on getting healthy, i.e. eating well, excercising (granted I still have to pay professionals to force me to do that), going to bed early. One day, if I get the foundations right, I might progress to other more advanced grown up things such as learning to ride a bike, getting my license or even getting a passport...on second thoughts, I think I'd rather stay home and drink some wine.