From the nest

I enjoy my job, but it consumes most of my waking hours, at least in terms of mental energy. This semester’s early teaching starts mean early nights (I have become as jealous a protector of my sleep as a dam of her pups) and the space between finishing work and retiring is usually spent in listless bouts of housework or in the company of Señor Mojito. As a companion he can’t be faulted—we have cooked some delicious meals, drunk some good wine and followed the whole season of Rock of Love with its multiple personifications of feminine competitiveness and expressive flipping of the bird—but the lack of idle moments in my life at present leave little time for journal-keeping. I’m aware too that these pages developed as a counterpoint to the early days of my job, a way of keeping the self I cherished from being absorbed by the testing conformities demanded by professional life. Now that there has been a shift, both in me and in the requirements of my job, I no longer need to write in order to stop myself from disappearing. This is a good thing for me, but not so much for those who would like to read more here, more regularly.

That said, it has been a good month. Harvestbro is here at present, DJ-ing a lively and atmospheric drum + bass set at Double Happy last weekend, as the headlining act in a trans-Tasman crew (all of whose Australian members, himself included, were New Zealanders by birth) and drumming for the Jamfa reunion that was also the first anniversary of Fat Eddie’s, mid-week. Señor Mojito and I felt our age last weekend as we drank coffee and played Guitar Hero in order to stay up late enough to be alert at the 1am start time for harvestbro’s set, then lamented, silently, our inability to hit the floor as once we might have. I danced for twenty minutes, rested with the señor for another twenty, and then we busted our dual moves together. Later we regaled each other with tales of our former moves: the señor at twenty could drop into the splits then snap back to a standing position, or flail in a moshpit for unlimited periods. I was more of a leaper and shaker, happy to salsa or meringue indefinitely with my friends, or break out, in other contexts, the serious disco moves that we learned as kids in the eighties from older cousins. Now, knees, backs, necks and the generally heavy flesh of the softly ageing middle class make such feats impossible.

There was more gender confusion at Fat Eddie’s when a well-known-academic tapped the good señor on the shoulder, said, “Excuse me, would you like to dance?” and then, as the señor turned around, exclaimed, “Oh shit! You’re a guy!” and took off. Is this to be our pattern, perhaps? I can’t say I mind; it soothes my uneasiness at embracing heteronormativity, shall we say, that my tall, broad-shouldered and wide-formed fiancé is still mistakable for a woman in the right light.

Harvestbro is about to embrace the entrepreneurial life again, as is the cycle of life for a Melbourne musician, and is readying himself, I think, this time, to do well out of it: expanding his audio engineering business, taking on more music students and generally planning business well in advance of the dates on which it’s done. I admire his tenacity, his searchlight-like gaze on his skills and potential limitations and his general spirit for this work. Of his musical talents you have read much in other entries. I think his drumming and composition students will be lucky to have him.

I have asked the harvestbro to be in my wedding party, along with Nanette and A-Lee as my brideswomen. It has been a surprise, both to me and, to a far greater extent, to the good señor, the extent to which I have embraced the figure of The Bride. I had not thought that she loomed at all in my consciousness, but it seems that she was there all along, with her colour charts and event plans and fabric swatches and coordinating colours.* That it’s still more than two years before we plan to bring The Bride to life has done little to stop her from grabbing my imagination in a few distracted moments. There she is, the feminine dream, embodiment of gender, if not biology, as destiny, signal within the pre-modern family of intra-cultural success: to carry on the perpetuation of the household, to the next generation. I grew up with the frequent absorption of my many older cousins into the role of The Bride, then worked in my twenties as a musician in the wedding industry. I have seen her incarnation many times, and it seems I want, after all, her stamp on my identity.

When discussing this with A-Lee she immediately thought of The Bride in different guise and asked if, as brideswoman, she could be “the one with the cool eyepatch“. Of course, I said, and then imagined, as hard as I could, my short, stout self in the lithe and willowy guise of Uma Thurman. At a minimum, I have a samurai-style sword of my own, and would happily fly to Okinawa in a heartbeat, but, save these qualities, little of this fantasy heroine remains in me. By this, I am curiously reassured.

The wedding, when it comes, will be Señor Mojito’s project too, of course, and he has ideas which will shape whatever we do. But those ideas are not mine to here rehearse and, with a nod to his particular superstition that if you articulate it in too much detail, it may not happen, I keep silent on his thoughts on this matter.

Before any wedding plans are even sketched, there are many other matters to which we have to attend, not least of which is the merging of our households. As happy an event as this is, I’m sad that it means the señor will leave his central-city man-nest with Archie, where the location and the view are unsurpassed. For half a million dollars—the house is now for sale—we could attempt to buy it for ourselves, but even the sweetest of residences and locations is not worth that kind of debt, not at this time, nor possibly ever. In truth, I’m deeply attached to my own small secret garden that the dogs and I share, and am both happy and relieved that the señor wants to make his home here too, even as it means forsaking a more typical kind of Christchurch gentility for something possibly more quirky but also more untidy and less ideally located for socialising.

And before this takes place there are innumerable essays to be marked, lectures to be written and domestic detritus to be cleared out. Even as I’ve found the rhythm of these busy days at work my housekeeping has suffered, and I’m not looking forward to reaching into the back of my cupboards in service of finding things to throw out so the señor can fit his possessions into our home. It’s not that I live in mess, or dirt, but rather that there’s a series of shifting contents, that, save the surfaces on which they lie, don’t really have a home. This is the downside, I suppose, of nesting, the accumulated contents that are neither nest materials nor the outside world.

*I should add that I have not, in fact, gone this far at this early stage, even as I imagine these to be The Bride’s accessories as she flies, anima-like, through the culture’s collective unconscious.

Tagged as: family, household mess, love, music, weddings