Dad

Today I’ve decided to tell you about my dad.

My dad and I have a weird relationship. We get on really well, but we don’t. We enjoy a lot of the same things, but we’re very different. We are exceptionally similar, and yet we’re not.

When I think of my dad, I think of music. I think of Deborah Conway, the Cure, the Beatles and Crowded House. I think of the kind of music I first listened to as a teenager. Dad sings your name in songs. He replaces words so that you fit into the lyrics. I thought the song “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe was called “Lizzy” for a very long time, perhaps longer than I care to admit.

Lizzy, my head is spinning

Like a whirl pool it never ends.

My dad doesn’t understand text messaging, or facebook. He thinks twitter is where people “tell you when they’ve been to the bathroom”. He only just recently learnt I have a blog, and is in no way sure what that is. He thinks technology is stupid, but mum is always complaining that he’s on her ipad, playing Word with Friends and reading ebooks.

Like me, dad is obsessive. He’ll get into something, and he’ll get into it hard. He owns and has read every book by Bill Bryson, he’s read Tony Martin’s book Lolly Scramble perhaps 8 times, and laughs at the jokes every time. He likes Community and Modern Family and The Office. When I was little he watched every episode of Red Dwarf many, many times. Also like me, he will never shut up about something he loves. He nearly ruined The Princess Bride for my mum by talking about it hundreds of times before she got to see it.

Dad is the King of nicknames. He doesn’t call any of us kids by our actual names. He calls me Itch, or Ish, or Itchbitch, or Elsbeth, for reasons that are too convoluted to explain.

Sometimes he’ll call me and I’ll assume it’s about something specific, and we’ll spend twenty-five minutes chatting and then I’ll say “so were you calling for a reason?” and then I’ll realise I’ve hurt his feelings because, no, in fact he was just calling for a chat. Other times he’ll call me for something specific and then I’ll start chatting about other stuff and he’ll say “sorry I’m actually in the middle of something” and then he’ll be gone. Those are, in fact, the two kinds of conversations we have on the phone.

My dad and I don’t always know how to communicate, is what I’m saying. It’s as though we move on different planes of existence, and sometimes they coexist, and sometimes they don’t. But I love my dad. Perhaps more than I ever communicate, and he loves me, perhaps more than he ever communicates. And maybe that means we are on the same page after all.  

Epipha-map

Self Portrait - Lizzy King, 2013

Sometimes we change our minds slowly; we learn gently, and subconsciously, we may never even realise that our opinions have grown. Other times, realisation comes like a clap of thunder. We might be reading something, or sleeping, or talking with someone, and then suddenly, BAM – the light bulb cliché, the explosion of knowledge. I like to think that those moments are a good way to map our development as humans. So here’s my epipha-map.

Epiphany Number 1: not all families are the same.

In grade 1 or 2 I went to my first sleep over at a friend’s house. I remember my mum telling me I had to wear knickers to bed. I never wore knickers with my pyjamas (secretly, I probably didn’t start doing so till I was a teenager) and I remember being quite weirded out by this change in my sleeping attire. But that wasn’t the epiphany. Sitting at the dinner table with this nuclear family of four, it occurred to my small brain that it was actually probably a bit weird that I called my dad Tony and that he did most of the cooking. And I remember not liking my friend’s dad because he had a moustache and liked his lawn more than he seemed to like his family. My mum did all the garden work, and I actually sort of had it in my head that mums were outside people in my world and dads were really good at making cheesy cauliflower. And in that moment I realised that not everyone was like us (awesome).

Epiphany Number 2: Fractions and decimals are the same thing.

I was quite a clever kid. I was good at most subjects at school without even really trying. I was a very good reader, I liked writing and science things the best, but I also was pretty good at maths too. Until I was about 10. And then suddenly, maths got hard. I struggled intensely with anything that combined letters and numbers: 3 + x = 7?! How can an x be in there?! Xs are for words, not maths. The whole thing baffled and upset me. In particular, I could not cope with fractions. I got my head around decimals ok, but spent hours freaking out about fractions. And then my mum spent a day baking with me. We measured things out with measuring cups, and she patiently explained how 1/4 + 1/4 could equal 1/2. And I got it. I was happy. The next day at school we were working on some maths problems and I had a little “oh!” moment as I realised that 0.25 + 0.25 = 0.5 as well. They were the same thing. All this time, they were the same bloody thing. I felt like a genius idiot.

Epiphany Number 3: Belief isn’t fact.

On school camp, some of the girls were reading out horoscopes from a magazine and asked me what mine was. I went on a small rant about the ridiculousness of the belief that somehow rocks in space could tell us anything about our little mundane lives. Basically, I killed the fun. My atheist friend looked up from the magazine and said, “you know Lizzy, the way you feel about horoscopes, that’s the way I feel about Christianity”. I was pretty pissed and stomped off, I guess not because she’d said it, but because she’d called me out. I was religious at the time, but that moment was one of the first times I deigned to consider other people’s beliefs as in any way legitimate. Not that I suddenly thought horoscopes made any sense (they make none, to be clear), but in that one sentence, my friend had made me realise that all belief is kind of ridiculous, and it doesn’t hurt to be a little bit respectful. (If you’re reading this, Hilde, I give you permission to gloat).

Epiphany Number 4: I’m not a Catholic.

On the subject of religion, I started doubting and questioning my faith around the age of 16. At the end of the school year I went overseas with my choir, and we sang in amazing places across Europe. We sang a church service in a Catholic cathedral and it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. We were told that only those who were Catholic were allowed to leave the singing to take Communion. So I dramatically stepped out from my 75 fellow singers, along with 3 or so other students and walked the length of the cathedral to get my bread and wine in the fanciest setting possible. And swallowing it was like swallowing chalk and acid. As I walked back to place I realised I’d done it to be different, to be interesting, for fun and I vowed never to take Communion again unless I was sure it was what I wanted. I’ve not touched it to this day.

Epiphany Number 5: Pride and Prejudice.

The themes are in the fucking title. Right there, on the goddamn cover.

Epiphany Number 6: It’s not them it’s me.

In 2009 I got quite sad. And anxious. And stressed. I was depressed at the end of high school too, but this was a whole new ball game. I sort of felt like I wasn’t allowed to call myself depressed because I knew people who’d battled depression for years, and mine came on quite suddenly. In the space of a few weeks I went from being pretty happy and ok to locking myself in my room, not eating, hurting myself, being in a constant state of panic. I probably would not have sort help had it not been for the paranoia. I had an overwhelming sensation that people, all people, everywhere, were looking at me. I knew, logically, that they couldn’t be, but empirically, evidence that I was seeing with my own eyes was that they were. So I went to a psychologist. It was three or so weeks before I got the courage to tell her people were looking at me and she said, “have you considered, Lizzy, it’s that you are looking at them?” No I had not considered this, I admitted. She told me to practise not making eye contact for a whole day, and see if this fixed the problem. I walked out of her office and up the street and instantly realised I was making eye contact with people. So I stopped. It was excessively difficult, I had been the one freaking other people out all along. I genuinely skipped home with happiness. While the battle for my happiness took a lot more than a quick fix realisation, this epiphany helped me so much, that I honestly don’t know how I would have survived without it.

Epiphany Number 7: I can’t run out of inspiration.

Almost every time I sit down to write a blog, I don’t know what I’m going to write about. And it’s becoming a problematic fear. I won’t go near my computer for hours, I’ll dawdle and procrastinate and ask people what I should say and read a book and hope it’ll go away. And then every time, without fail, I’ll open a word document with a blank mind and suddenly find something to write about. Like just now, when I had an epiphany about epiphanies, and started telling you about it. There’s always going to be stuff in my brain and as long as people keep reading (and even if they don’t), I’m going to keep writing it down.

Ever had an epiphany? Tell me about it via comment, facebook, twitter, carrier pigeon.

Floodiversary

Tuesday, the 11^th of January 2011 felt like just a normal Tuesday. Sure, I had to wear gumboots to work *again* but that wasn’t so strange, given I’d done so almost every day through December. It was a particularly rainy Summer, which was frustrating, but no one seemed to think it was weird. On Tuesday the 11^th I walked across New Farm Park to my work at the Powerhouse, sloshing through puddles, hoping that our regular Tuesday meeting wouldn’t be too boring. I don’t remember if we ever had that meeting, because Tuesday the 11^th of January, 2011 was the day Brisbane started filling with water.

I don’t remember how we first heard about the flood, but I do remember that work basically stopped happening after we did. I brought up news sites and twitter feeds and sat glued to them for about 20 minutes. Then we made the decision to move all the lighting and sound equipment up from the lower levels. I ran around with everyone else, moving equipment in an impractical dress. At some point my mum called. To be honest at this point I hadn’t really thought about my family home. My workplace and house were in New Farm, I was confronted with the issues in front of me, and I had no clue about the ones that were to come.

Mum and Dad were frantically driving back from a holiday in New South Wales, a holiday cut short by literally hundreds of phone calls from friends, worrying about my parents’ home in Sherwood. Mum asked me if I could go across town to rescue their dog from a kennel, the staff there weren’t sure if they could get all the animals to higher ground (spoiler: he was rescued, it was fine). I think that’s when I first started panicking. Later I found out that my response to mum, that unfortunately I couldn’t because I was needed at work, and my housemate and I were desperately trying to work out whether or not we were going to evacuate, was when mum started properly panicking too.

I ran home across the sodden park in my dress and gumboots. One of my housemates was overseas, but my other housemate and I sat on our lounge room floor and tried to make a plan. We still didn’t really believe it was all that bad, but we were worried about her car, and about what would happen if we got stranded. So I put my birth certificate and some other prized possessions on top of a bookshelf, we packed up a bunch of our food and clothes, and went to our friend’s house in Bardon.

Some parts of that week are completely etched into my brain, and other parts are a big blur.

Blur:

1.     How long we stayed, it was almost a week I think?

2.     What we filled the long hours with?

3.     Did we even talk about anything other than floods?

4.     Why did we think it was ok to go to that party in the middle of the week? That was weird. I had a panic attack.

Etched:

1.     Going for a walk near a swollen creek and being convinced that the guy randomly standing on it was going to get sucked under and die in front of me.

2.     Watching press conference after press conference featuring Anna Bligh

3.     People coming to visit us like we were some kind of flood coping epicentre.

4.     Twitter

5.     The phone call from my mum on the Wednesday.

You know how in movies, people sink into chairs after receiving bad news? Even as I was doing it I was conscious of how dramatic I must have looked, sinking into a chair. I’d last spoken to mum on Tuesday afternoon, there was water in their backyard and they were evacuating. I thought they were going to get water in the bottom storey, an area largely devoted to concrete, storage and washing machines. But on Wednesday morning my mum said she’d gone down at 5am and the water had reached the top floor, and it hadn’t peaked yet. The next day it got to about waist height on the top floor.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought this could happen. Even while watching other houses go under on the news, even though the area had gone under in 1974, even though I knew they had evacuated, I still somehow thought that it’d get a bit wet under their house and we could all move on. But no, actually this happened:

The water reaches the top story (the house is on a hill sloping backwards)

The water is slightly lower than it's highest point here

  

Our house in New Farm was unscathed, though we didn’t have power for more than a week. I went back at some stage, to get some things and to throw out the food we’d left behind. The whole suburb stank of rotting food, thrown into skips left around by the council.

We joined the clean up in Sherwood on Saturday. Me, my housemate Samara, our evacuee saviour Mim, my boyfriend Jeremy and our friend Chris. We couldn’t get there any earlier, and it took us more than an hour and a half to drive from Bardon to Sherwood. It was hot, it was stinky, but in some ways it was fun. Production lines of volunteers tried to remove the actual sewerage from the yard, walls were ripped out, photos were salvaged. I had to keep doing things; otherwise I think I would have cried. Everything was grey, muddy, it looked like a war zone instead of a suburban street. There was a pumpkin in my parents’ yard. A pumpkin. There was a metal barrel stuck in a tree next door.

Who needs walls anyway, right?

Clean up in the back yard

It’s the 13^th January 2013 today. It’s been two years and two days since the flood came, two years and one day since I dramatically sunk into a chair, two years to the day since the flood peaked. My parents have rebuilt, have repainted and returfed. They have replaced the things they lost, and are in many ways I think stronger for what happened. Sometimes I almost forget it happened, and other times I see a photo of floods and get all weepy. I know that we had it lucky, no one died or was seriously injured, the house is in a nice area and lots of people came to help and clean and be supportive.

I know that in poorer suburbs and towns, people felt neglected, felt forgotten and abandoned, and that this isn’t fair. But the flood was the hardest thing I’ve had to cope with in my short life and was one of the biggest things my family has ever gone through together. I guess I just wanted to tell you about it, because it’s kind of the anniversary, and I’ve never really spoken about it on my blog before. You can’t take much from this story except “well floods are shit” but I am glad you’re here, reading my blog, and I hope you stick around into the very exciting year that is 2013. I promise it won’t be this serious too often. 

12 Reasons it's OK to Hate Christmas

I try not to be too grinchy, but I’m really not a Christmas kind of person. I find it kind of stressful, and never what I hope it to be. I like seeing my family, but I much prefer to do so on a quieter, less jingly kind of day.

The most frustrating thing about Christmas for me is this: no one will just let me not enjoy it. I used to be pretty obnoxious about my distaste for the festive season, but these days I try to be as subtle as possible. But even though I work very hard to not get in the way of other peoples’ enjoyment of Christmas, they just reeeeeally want me to join in. And that would be fine too, but the more I resist, the angrier they seem to get. And I think the problem is that I don’t have a good reason, as such, for not liking Christmas. It’s mostly just that I find it not at all relaxing or pleasant, but you can’t explain that to people when they are trying to get you to wear reindeer antlers in the workplace.

So with that in mind, I have compiled a list of reasons it would be ok to not like Christmas, feel free to use these if you find yourself caught between a singing Santa and an unpleasant co-worker under the mistletoe.

12 Reasons it's OK to Hate Christmas by Lizzyish

1.     Your mother died in a hideous Christmas decoration explosion. They couldn’t tell where the tinsel ended and her intestines began.

2.     You are allergic to wrapping paper.

3.     Your entire family died when a sleigh fell on their heads during a staged family Christmas photo. You survived by eating your way out of the fake snow.

4.     Aliens have abducted you literally every Christmas day since you were born. It’s just tiring now really.

5.     “Jingle Bells” is a trigger from your old military days. The second you hear it, you go into a blind rage and kill everyone you see.

6.     Your parents named you Santa.

7.     You are a devout member of a new Christian denomination that believes Jesus was born on June 17^th.

8.     You work in retail.

9.     You were once a subject in a scientific experiment where you had your eyes taped open and were forced to watch all of those Tim Allen Santa Clause films back to back.

10. You are the eleventh Lord-a-Leaping and thus forever left behind. Leaping, leaping… alone.

11. Seeing the combination of red and green makes you inexplicably, spontaneously shit yourself. People always wish you a “Merry Shitmas”, they cover it, but you know… you know.*

12. You are one of the 105,000 people who will have nowhere to go at Christmas this year.

* You also hate the Rabbitohs

Hum Drum Holidays! I will be taking a short sojourn from le blog and will return in January with more lists like this one, more analysis of my teenhood, other fun stuff, and anything else you might want to see. Let me know if there's something in particular you would like me to do more of/less of/some of in comments or on any of my social mediums. In the meantime, I say funny stuff here, and update you about new blogs and how much I hate Facebook here. 

Have a lovely Christmas and New Year, thanks for reading - you all mean the world to me. 

Lizzy xx