I don’t know what’s wrong with me — I feel absolutely rancid. I was sick yesterday, and it’s carried over into today. I haven’t actually thrown up today like I did yesterday, but I’m feeling really, really bad. The only thing I can compare it to is when I was in Tanzania and got so sick I thought I was going to die.
It must be the plasma donation I made on Friday. I’ve done a bit of research online, and nausea and vomiting can be a side effect of donating. If I’m not feeling much better tomorrow, I think I might go to the doctor.
I literally feel like death warmed up, and it’s at times like this that all I want is someone — anyone — to simply be nice to me. I don’t want to be waited on hand and foot; I just want someone to ask if I’m okay, or see if they can make me a hot chocolate or a piece of Vegemite on toast. But that’s something I’ve never been able to get from my mother or father.
I don’t know why, but my dad always lacked sympathy for me when I was sick, and my mother can be absolutely cruel. Today I’ve barely been able to move. I wasn’t complaining or whinging — I just told Mum how I was feeling — and she immediately started talking about how sick she was. The same thing she says every single day.
She’s been trying to get me to do things, huffing and puffing when I’ve said I’m really not up to it, and now she’s started making plans for the rest of the week — pushing things on me when all I want is to rest. It’s as if she’s completely oblivious to the fact that I’m in a really bad way.
When Nanny was around, if I was living with Mum and Dad, I knew they’d be dismissive of me needing some kindness when I was sick. So I’d call Nanny and ask her to come check on me — just to make sure I was still alive. And she would always come.
I don’t know why my parents didn't and don't seem to see the merit in illness, but sometimes I’ve felt — and still feel — that I have to beg Mum for even the tiniest bit of compassion.
I don’t feel sorry for myself, but feeling so bad today has really made me stop and think about being alone — and the implications of that. Whilst I’m not technically alone living with Mum, I may as well be. She literally couldn’t care less about how sick I am.
I know that, as a forty-four year old woman, I shouldn’t be living with my mother. But if I wasn’t living with her, I would be completely alone, and at my age that would be a totally different ball game. Mum also can’t live alone now, so I’ll be living with her indefinitely. But the point is, I shouldn’t be reliant on her to be nice to me just because I’m not feeling well. I should be completely reliant on myself — and, thankfully, I always have my cats for companionship.
Yesterday I told you about Roger — that vile, racist specimen of a man who, for some unknown reason, I seem to be drawn to. I think that’s testament to the fact that, in some small way, I want a partner. But I think it also says something about me — that the only man I can attract is someone who literally wants to do his business on me to get his rocks off.
When I think about my dream man, I think about the Prime Minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani. He’s a mediator, he’s humble, and he looks like he’s got a good sense of humour. The only thing is, he’s young — he’s only forty-five. But I would love to meet a man like him.
Another man who represents the kind of qualities I like is Kiril Pavlovich Lakota, who becomes Pope Kiril I in the 1968 film The Shoes of the Fisherman. Pope Kiril I is played by Anthony Quinn, and he is simply beautiful to look at. But more than that, his character rejects wealth and pomp, abandons the traditional coronation and the papal tiara, and commits the Church’s resources to the suffering and hungry, especially during a global crisis. I know he’s the Pope, and he can’t be with a woman, but I would love to meet a man with those same principles.
That’s not to say I don’t personally want wealth. I do — not opulence, but enough to travel and live comfortably. But there is a difference between wealth and obscenity.
The way I’m feeling physically has made me soft. Dreaming of finding love just so someone would make me Vegemite on toast feels a little ridiculous. At the end of the day, I know I’ll probably always be on my own, and when I am really alone and no longer living with Mum, there are services available for people living independently with not a lot of support. I’ll just have to trust in the process of those services.
Whilst I only want one man, in the past week I have thoroughly explored five different vocations, mapping out study and career paths for each: kitchen management, floristry, journalism, fine arts, and diversional therapy. For each path, I was convinced that this was what I was going to do, and I even applied for studies in most of them.
I think I have a problem. A serious one.
It comes from so many things: moving through so many different schools, then bouncing around as a temp in countless workplaces. There’s also this strange belief I seem to carry that I’m going to live forever — that there will always be time to chop and change, to fix things, to start over.
But I am forty-four. Time is fleeting. I’m starting almost thirty years later than my fellow students. It’s a harsh reality to face.
For a moment this week, I genuinely believed I would be a chef, a florist, a journalist, an artist, and a diversional therapist. Some of these things I’ve explored before. Diversional therapy is new. But I have an inability to commit to one direction and stick with it. It feels like I wanted to do everything and ended up doing nothing, and that’s a sobering truth.
My brother keeps telling me to just go and get a job — that people don’t care about a degree at my age, they care about experience. But it would be extremely hard to break into a new field without any education or training in the discipline.
If I sit down and really think about what my skills are, they’re conceptual artwork and writing. I trust my ability to come up with creative ideas. My only problem is having the smarts to bring them to life. Dad always told me I was a talented writer. I don’t know about talented, but I do enjoy it. I write by blurting words onto a page and then I get AI to fix the punctuation and spelling. The words are all mine.
So it comes down to journalism or fine art. Journalism I can do from home — the degree is online. Fine art at uni would give me the hands-on skills to physically produce quality expressions of the ideas inside my head.
I think it’s going to be fine arts. But I'll decide tomorrow when I'm feeling better.
Working in over seventy offices around Adelaide, I made a few observations. One thing I came across more than once was women coming to work with wet hair.
I actually think it takes a certain level of arrogance to step into a professional environment without drying your hair, or at least waiting for it to dry. It’s as if they lack the common decency to devote what is really only a small amount of time to showing their place of employment that they didn’t just jump out of the shower, and head straight to work.
It’s so arrogant. These women act like they’re above the rest of the population, like they don’t need to show their colleagues or peers any respect. The message is: I am here at work as I am at home. There’s no differentiation. I think it’s lazy, arrogant, and extremely unprofessional.
I have never gone to work with wet hair, and I never will. Until today, I’d never even left the house with wet hair, but I washed my hair this morning and I was feeling so unwell that when Mum and I went to Bunnings, my hair was still a little bit wet. It’s the first time in my forty-four years that I’ve ever done that.
I know going to Bunnings is not my job, and there’s no real expectation that my personal appearance had to be sharp, but I remembered those handful of women I’d seen in a workplace with wet hair — one of them literally dripping — and I felt a sense of shame.
And then, as if the gods were making a point of it, when I went to Foodland at Erindale on the way home, there was a woman with short curly brown hair — and her hair was wet.
I think it is wet hair day.
