Saturday was the Hen Day and Night. In between lunch and dinner, we went to Willowbank. There we saw the ring-tailed lemurs.
I like this video because you can hear my mother laughing.
Flickr Video
Originally published at The White Mist.
With a long-sighted father and a short-sighted mother, it was more likely than not that my brother and I would need glasses one day. For both of us, that day came before childhood was out. With great determination, I switched to contact lenses at fourteen, rejecting that large-lensed, plastic-framed spectacles that were the style at the time. I wore contact lenses until I started working full-time, when glasses became more practical in the air-conditioned, eye-drying environment.
Glasses frames remain, however, subject to the vagaries of fashion, and it’s with this in mind that I’ve decided to wear contact lenses again for the wedding. (Señor Mojito, who, like many sensible people, cannot bear to put a finger against his eyeball, will be chancing future changes of fashion and staying bespectacled.) For the first time in many years, then, I’ve had cause to see my face from a distance without glasses. What a strange experience.
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My thanks to you all for your kind wishes on the next few months’ change of occupation. I spent today on sick leave, not discharging my duties. The pattern of the days when I am on my feet and on the job is not that different from the rhythms of teaching: thinking, preparing, doing, reflecting. The difference is that I share my work now with a wider variety of people, and have a rather more looming sense of my responsibilities to others, because I am new at them.
Last week I endeavoured to combine a meeting in Wellington with a few days’ break. It may have been a better idea to schedule the break after, rather than around, the meeting, but I am not necessarily the best decision-maker concerning my leisure. Nonetheless, it was splendid to see so many people and do so many things.
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A recent article on the Fairfax webpages profiled a group of school pupils preparing for the annual ball. Here they are, dressed up and excited, as featured in the main shot of the article. There is also a series of four- or five-minute videos, which I confess I haven’t viewed. It would be an exercise in nostalgia, which, as you’ll see, doesn’t sit completely easily with me.
To the Ball
My high-school ball, or formal as we called it at the time (“balls” were for the posh schools) was nearly seventeen years ago, a literal half lifetime. I wore a dress my mother made for me, from a wedding-gown pattern. I chose the fabrics: crushed velvet for the bodice and sleeves and a black background with red rose-print for the skirt. I wore my mother’s jewellery, and possibly her shoes too. Though my skirt was full-length, I wore patterned black stockings which I saved for years, until they no longer fit.
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The señor doesn’t tweet much, but when he does, it amuses me no end.
Towit:
@harvestbird: A covers band in an Irish bar. It may be time to stop drinking. #
@knedd: In Mickey Finns Megan wimping out #
(All it has taken for him to join me in Web 2.0 was an iPhone. When yesterday morning I got up I found him on TradeMe, “buying the phone a present”. It was a protective carry-case.)
I enjoy the gender confusion the señor creates when we step out late of an evening. A pink-cheeked, fresh-faced, drunk twenty-year old in an Aertex Shirt bailed us up on the way to the grim venue above, to shout “You look like a girl!” (to which the señor cheerfully exclaimed, “you look like a dickhead”). Earlier, a curly-haired man in a trilby hat had chatted up our booth of drinkers at our wedding joint, before exclaiming, “oh shit, there’s a guy there!” Earlier still, at the house-party at which the revelry started, a former student of mine poured me boysenberry wine while expressing a wish to dress the señor’s hair. She later attempted freehand pigtails. My beloved’s androgyny casts light on how others feel about gender binaries, and the fears and pleasures therein.
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Posterous
To grow accustomed to this face
10 October, 2009
in commentatrix,the social round,we are family
Originally published at The White Mist.
With a long-sighted father and a short-sighted mother, it was more likely than not that my brother and I would need glasses one day. For both of us, that day came before childhood was out. With great determination, I switched to contact lenses at fourteen, rejecting that large-lensed, plastic-framed spectacles that were the style at the time. I wore contact lenses until I started working full-time, when glasses became more practical in the air-conditioned, eye-drying environment.
Glasses frames remain, however, subject to the vagaries of fashion, and it’s with this in mind that I’ve decided to wear contact lenses again for the wedding. (Señor Mojito, who, like many sensible people, cannot bear to put a finger against his eyeball, will be chancing future changes of fashion and staying bespectacled.) For the first time in many years, then, I’ve had cause to see my face from a distance without glasses. What a strange experience.
[click to continue…]
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