so maybe this wasn't the best idea (but then saved by Martians)

So, I don't have any NY's eve plans. Quiet one at home, I thought. Good enough for lots of people, in fact you sound a bit superior when you tell people, "Go out? New Year's Eve? Oh, no, God no, I'm just going to have a quiet one at home."

But I hate being along on NY's eve - no date, no one to kiss, no people around to ring out the old and in the new.

I really did try to make a plan, I was going to make myself a decent dinner - but forgot to go to the grocery store on the way home, didn't I? And spend some time reflecting on the year that was, and resolving resolutions. And then maybe some entertainment. I followed my usual rule of getting a DVD to watch when alone that absolutely no one would want to be subjected to besides me, and bought this evening at Barnes & Noble a 5-CD set of musical performances from Saturday Night Live. And then cracked a Clos du Bois Pinot Grigio (poison of choice lately) and watched Disk 1.

Thing is, the performances, all from 1975-1976, I vividly remember seeing most of them back in the day, when they first aired. Belushi and Joe Cocker, Belushi doing Joe Cocker while standing right beside him. Jagger and Peter Tosh doing "Walk and Don't Look Back". Paul Simon starting "Still Crazy After All These Years" dressed in a turkey suit.

I work with people who were born quite a few years after these shows were made.

What's the point of it, anyway? One day we will get so old that we will start dying off, and the kids will turn 45 and have their own thing that they remember from when they were young. You can wallow in nostalgia like I am doing tonight, or you can make plans and move forward, but I know that any plan I make now is just something artificial constructed to make advisors and family and friends happy. You don't ever actually make it anywhere. Pain just accumulates in life. I still remember the pain of being a dissatisfied teenager, and now I'm a disgruntled 40-something so that pain is layered on.

Why am I alone on NY's eve, at this late stage in my life?

Because I'm sucky company for anybody, that's why.

I watched the Kennedy Center Honors last night and Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry were honorees, and there was a bang-up version of "Love, Reign O'er Me" by a lady whose name I didn't catch, and I swear both rock stars were tearing up, up there in the balcony seats, and I certainly was, here at home. When I was 17, overcome with a hopeless crush, I would lie in bed with big puffy headphones on and listen to Quadrophenia and get weepy when listening to this song. And when I got to college I used to watch the movie of Quadrophenia every few years to measure how far I'd advanced from that weepy teenager. But last night I was even more weepy. Here's the equation:

When you're a teenager, the angst is impatience to be older so all this pain will be gone.

When you're 40-something, you know that not only will that pain never leave you, you'll accumulate even more pain on top of it, and so 40-something angst is much deeper and worser. I can vividly remember how it felt to be 17 and impatient and having a hopeless crush, and now I'm 45 and still have hopeless crushes, PLUS the pain of the break-up of a long-term partnership on top, which you can't have unless you've invested the long-term time in the partnership in the first place, so it's an exquisite sort of pain that you can only get from investing the time, like laying down a fine bottle of wine in just the right condition so it ages properly. Layered on top of the past and current teen-aged crush pain.

It's a wonder anyone makes it through it. And also that they keep it secret from the teenagers...

Actually, you can see it, in the very best, pivotal scene in Lost in Translation, where they are lying in his hotel bed and Scarlett Johanssen asks Bill Murray, "Does it get easier?" and he says, "No." But then he changes his mind and says, "Yes." Because he knows it only gets harder, but he also knows he has to tell her that it gets easier so she can keep on.

Okay, I'm not actually thinking of doing anything to stop this journey, to get off this ride, because I don't believe in that. It's irrational for the will to will itself not to be. So, I give it up. I deliver up this crazy life and the senselessness and pointlessness of being 45-

• being a 45
• year-old woman
• in Wisconsin, in the dark and snow and cold
• alone
• on New Year's Eve
• watching sketches she first saw at age 12, while staying up too late, on the dodgy color tv in her parents' new built-on room in Omaha
• now captured for nostalgia purposes on technology we couldn't even dream about back then
• purchased on a whim by swiping a debit card, because I now have a career and a good enough job to have plenty of little discretionary income even on Dec 31 right after Xmas
• and then getting online and blogging about it, on a free blog with extremely user-friendly software and reliable hosting that is absolute FREE and doesn't even have any ads on it
• that's right, not hunched over a spiral notebook scribbling overwrought thoughts and emotions in a notebook that will gather dust and/or get thrown out upon the reconciliation of my estate, but
• writing it here, where Google will look after it and the Martians will find it in a million years when they come down and notice the written record of this life
• All these lives, all these beautiful bloggers with their own stories of New Year's Eve and nostalgia.

I can picture the Martians sitting around saying to each other, "Man, it must have sucked to be a single 45-year old woman in Wisconsin in the US in 2008."

"Yeah," says the other Martian, "but keep reading! Because do you know who she grows up to be?"

Gallipoli

We were at a brunch for my parents' Gourmet Group. The group has been meeting since 1977, so the friendships and bonds have gone far beyond just a hobby of cooking that originally brought them together - they've been through births, graduations, marriages, grandchildren, facelifts, heart surgery, remodelling, and buying a trailer and travelling America. For Christmas each year they meet at a restaurant for a fancy brunch and exchange gifts gathered in their travels all through the prior year.

This year the banker and his wife had been to Turkey. She had brought back beautifully painted trivets for everyone, and they were truly exotic and impressive.

I was sitting at the opposite end of the table to them, so I wasn't following the conversation at that end of the table, but at one point my Mom got my attention, "Ellen?" She pointed at the banker's wife and said, "Tell Ellen where you went."

The banker's wife leaned over the others between us on our side of the table and said, "Dar...nelle? The Straits of Dardanelle?"

I was racing to recall my Australian geography, but all I could remember was the Bass Strait and the Torres Strait. I shook my head, it wasn't ringing a bell.

"Where the battle was? Gallipoli?"

"Oh, my! You went to Gallipoli?" My heart moved in my chest like it does in the last scene of the movie. I tried to sort of explain to the others at the table, "That was really important, to the...every January they..." But the conversation had moved on.

It haunted me all day, the end of that sentence. "It's incredibly important to them- to me, to Australians, which is us, but really them, but also me..."

I am still an Australian, at least on paper. Is Gallipoli incredibly important to me, because I am an Australian, or are the Australians it is important to a "them", because I didn't grow up with it being important to me, although I now understand why it was, and I have left them and moved back here?

Going Postal

December 20, Saturday morning, at the Appleton post office. On the way to the airport, dropping off a package to mail to Australia, too late to get there by Christmas but probably in time to be there by New Year's.

The woman behind the counter is affixing customs forms and metered postage and I say, to make small conversation, "So, you have been really busy today?"

She looks up with a rueful gaze.

I nod.

She says, "They were here when we opened. It comes in spurts, but we had 13 when we opened this morning." She looks up, "Now there's only three, but still."

"I suppose it's better than the alternative!" I say brightly, echoing news reports of retail sales being down and a conversation with an employee at the guitar shop who said he's seen this kind of thing before, it comes and goes, it's down, but later it will be up, and what I mean is that if she's busy, it means people are shopping and buying presents and so the economy will probably do well this season, despite the recent woes and worries.

She says, "I just feel so bad! I mean, you just want to help people, you don't want them to have to stand there..."

My mind flashes back to the Surry Hills post office, in the back of the building with the Coles, and how every minute of every day, no matter when you drop by, there are 15, 20, 25 people in line, wrapping awkwardly around the stand of greeting cards so the last person doesn't keep making the automatic doors open, ignoring the people talking or yelling or singing to themselves, keeping distance from the smelly aging bachelor in front of you, waiting and waiting as people dispute power bills or present library books they want to fax or filling out customs forms for packages whose addresses are written all in Chinese.

Wisconsin postal workers must be unlike postal workers anywhere else in the world. "You just want to help people!" Imagine it.

Nourishment

So I finally broke down and got a copy of "You Can Heal Your Life". My sister has a copy, given to her by a friend, and I always had her look up things in it for me but she's in Antarctica so I've been without it as a resource and finally broke down and got my own one. This book includes an extensive list of body parts, and the spiritual meaning behind an ailment in that part, and then a mantra you should say to heal yourself of that spiritual malaise represented in the physical one.

I don't believe any of this stuff, of course. But when you have strange, sudden things happen to one specific body part, especially when they're not very serious, you can't help but attach a metaphorical meaning to it. For example, a few weeks ago on a Monday I woke up and had burst a blood vessel in one eye. Half of the eye was filled with screamingly red blood. I looked it up on WebMD and found it was nothing serious, basically just a bruise, and I'd probably got it from itching my eyes from allergies, during the night. But it sure was striking, and caused alarm and concern in everyone with whom I made eye contact for a whole week. So, for that kind of thing, it's irresistable to look up what symbolical message the universe might be trying to send you through the affliction. ("Represents the capacity to see clearly - past, present and future," btw, and the mantra is "I see with love and joy.")

Another example - last week I was away at a conference, and one afternoon right after lunch starting feeling funny, and spent the next 24 hours lying in a hotel bed with a sudden and dramatic stomach flu. I recovered in one day so it was just a 24-hour bug or something I ate, but I was still a bit delicate the next few days, so when the book arrived I looked it up.

For "stomach" it said, "Holds nourishment. Digests ideas," and the mantra is "I digest life with ease." And for "stomach problems" it said, "Dread, Fear of the new. Inability to assimilate the new," and the mantra is "Life agrees with me. I assimilate the new every moment of every day. All is well." Apropos for someone going through transitioning as part of a departmental restructure, hm?

So this week when my stomach has clenched on the way to work, I have been trying to say "Life agrees with me. I digest life." And it sort of transmogrified in my mind to, "My life nourishes me." And that helped a lot - I had been arriving at work feeling a bit more like work was eating me alive, snacking on me, gaining nourishment from me. So when I remember that it's supposed to work the other way, it put me in a mood of gratitude and appreciation for all the lovely and enjoyable things I do have.

And then, today it took another step - in that grateful, year-end mood I did a quick musing reflection of things I have to be thankful for this year. What were the highlights, the things that would go in a Christmas letter were I to get organized enought to write one? The website redesign that was celebrated at a wrap-up meeting just today. Guitar playing, everything about it, my new love and grand passion of my life. What about emotions caused by boys? Some of the highest highs of the year were caused by one particular crush. Dizzying highs, euphorias that would last days on end. But do I celebrate that now, at year's end, now that he's gone?

It struck me quite clearly - no. Right here in this moment in time, now, I have nothing of benefit remaining from those very high feelings a few months ago.

That boy was a drug, but was not a food.

That crush provided me no lasting nourishment. And I wonder if this little observation is going to stay with me, and provide me with guidance to make some better relationship choices, in the New Year.

Hay

I have a note in my notebook that says:

blog
view out the
side window
at work
- Anselm Kiefer

I remember what this was about - it was when the view out the side window at work was all of dead hay-colored grass and black earth, and black trees without leaves but dead yellow leaves below them. And then slate grey sky behind. These colors feature in the paintings of the German artist Anself Kiefer, and I've always liked his stuff. He has a long series of works that feature lead, gold and hay (actually stuck to the canvas, making them really heavy). I think there's something about the point at which each of these items burn, because the canvasses have often been set on fire so there's black charring around where the hay is. And the view out the side window at work was looking just like this for a while.

But that was back in early November, and now it's mid-December so everything is different. It has snowed a few times, large bodies of water are frozen solid, and there are no more golden colors anywhere. It's all white, everywhere, now, for the next months, and so it was funny to find this little note on things to blog.

Formalisms and emotion

When I saw the White Stripes at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, in early 2004, I was in the midst of my MBA. Constantly in the background of a full-time MBA program is the question, "Who am I?" in the sense of, "What am I good at?" and "What am I going to do for my next job?" The class I'd related to the most in my degree so far was, of all things, Basic Accounting. I had a really good teacher, and I did really well on the final - got into one of those states where you're so absorbed in an activity that you lose all sense of time, got all my balance sheets to balance, was confident in my answers.

The White Stripes at the Enmore was one of the best concerts I've ever, ever been to. It was the tour supporting the Elephant album which is still my favorite. Just Jack and Meg. But transcendent. He played the whole history of music on his one guitar, and you could hear how all the notes and melodic lines fit together and it was like Mozart, like Bach, like Hendrix, like the ghosts of all old blues masters playing through the fingers of a young scholar. I was transported, I was moved, I wanted to dedicate my life to doing something as profound and wonderful as this.

What I settled on that night was that I should do Accounting as Art. I should learn the structures and rules and logic of it, but then transcend beyond and be able to express the art in it.

What has actually happened is that I am learning to play blues guitar, just like Jack White. I have a teacher who knows enough music theory and is enough excited about it that he can explain chord structures and origins and relationships to me, and he himself specialized in blues-based rock and roll, and I live three hours from Chicago, and so I am immersing myself in blues theory, and I'm going to learn it well enough that I can express my emotions through it and make art. Who would have thought? But the inspiration I felt that night at the Enmore is still driving me, except just in a way that is much more directly related to the thing Jack White was doing.

p.s. When we did an exercise at a Marketing conference for work in April, on personal branding, the words that came back from my peers to describe me echoed what my Existentialism teacher had written on a paper back when I was a Sophomore in college - and I'm sure I've told you there here before as well. Reasoned Passion. That's the essence of me. Rock and roll guitar, with a teacher who knows lots of music theory, is the perfect medium to express these qualities. More than Accounting, I think.

p.p.s. And yes, it didn't escape me when I was writing the above that if you start to do art with Accounting, you end up either Enron or Lehman Brothers. So rock and roll guitar is a better bet anyway.

Wisconsiny homecoming

I'm doing my travel posts out of order, paging back through my notes.

I came back from Chicago to Milwaukee on the train on Friday night. I'd been in Chicago for a week. It was fun and all, and I did get out and about to see some familiar sites and some new ones. But you know what? I was anxious to get back home. Chicago was cold, and the city streets can be a bit grey and bleak, and I had to deal with homeless people asking me for change on every single corner on every trip, again, which I used to have to do every day on my way to work but haven't had to deal with since, and you can't really see anything from within the canyons of the tall buildings. And the Governor was led away from his house in handcuffs on corruption charges, right in the middle of my stay there. So although it's a great city, there are also some not so great things about it.

On the train I got out my iPod and listened to my five-star list, and was once again overwhelmed with the wonder and majesty of music itself, which I'd been away from while away from my guitar and also my YouTube addiction. But here it all was back. I didn't have a guitar to play so I drew a diagram of the strings and labelled all the notes and tried to work out intervals and major and minor scales and that kind of thing. So that made me feel like I was back home again, with my toys, being my whole self. I believe this happened right about the time we crossed the border.

As the train got closer to my stop I noticed that the snow was deeper, and there was a lot more space between the buildings.

I got off the train and a nice girl helped me with my suitcase. She had seen me struggling to get it in the overhead rack when I boarded (I bought some things, and it had got pretty heavy), and then when I was getting it back down again she came up and helped me, and then when I was going to make my way down the narrow and icy stairs of the train to disembark she just took my bag from me altogether and set it down on the sidewalk at the bottom. "I need to go back to the gym," I said, embarassed, and she said, "I do this for a living, don't worry about it." So, the very nice lady baggage handler saved me from trouble, because my bag was heavier than it had been going down and I was in a weakened state because of my belly thing a few days before. Very neighborly and Wisconsiny.

I had to scrape the ice and snow off my car. It looked like it had been pretty warm that day and then froze up again - there was a sheet of ice a half-inch thick all over the car, and when I got some of it loose the rest just slid off in huge chunks. Like how peanut brittle breaks up. It took a while to get the ice off the front windshield, and I brushed snow off the top of the car as well. There was another guy doing the same thing a few cars over, to his SUV. Then I tried to pull out, but the car slid on the ice and wouldn't go. I got out three or four times, trying to look for the block (shovelled some snow to make a path for the back wheels), but it still just spun. I tried to put some grocery bags down behind the front wheels for traction (front-wheel drive car) but they just slid under and spit out the other side. I gave up and waved at the SUV guy just as he was readying to drive off - once he left I would be alone in the lot and Triple-A would be my only option. He didn't seem real experienced pushing stuck cars, but we worked on it together, he pushed from the front and I got loose. I thanked him profusely, and he said, "No problem, we're in Wisconsin." That's what it's like. I remain deeply grateful.

I drove around the corner to the first hotel I got to - a Super 8. Not five-star like the hotel in Chicago had been, more about one or two stars. But friendly, welcoming, and they had a room in the inn for me. The parking lot was glare ice, they must not have any salt, but I tread carefully and didn't slip or fall. The guy at the front desk was odd but very kind - a tall, lean young black man with his hair pushed up in a mohawk and a sleepy jazzy manner. When he was writing out my credit card receipt (no fancy electronic machines at the Super 8), the very loud Christmas music in the lobby changed and the opening of Let It Snow startled me. I asked him, in order to make conversation, "So, are you sick of the Christmas music yet?" And he said, thoughtfully, while still writing, "No, I like the Christmas music. Because it makes me happy."

Welcome home, Ellen. I love Wisconsin.

Multi-culture

People worry about the monoculture, and argue that what with the McDonaldses and strip malls, everywhere in the world looks just like everywhere else and distinctive local cultures are disappearing.

This is not true.

I was at a Denny's near the airport in Milwaukee having breakfast. I ordered the two eggs (scrambled), toast (wheat), hash browns and coffee. I'd been battling a stomach thing over the previous few days and wanted something pretty mild and easy to deal with, digestion-wise, and didn't want to to anything risky or experimental. I piled the eggs on the toast at first, and it was pretty good, but I had toast left over and wanted to put something on it. There were little tubs of grape jelly and orange marmelade, but that would be too sweet, that wasn't quite it. I scanned myself to work out the specific nature of my desire, and what I wanted was Vegemite.

Then I reflected on the outrageous impossibility of them serving Vegemite in a Denny's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. No one in the Denny's at that moment had ever even heard of Vegemite, I was sure, and some of them probably couldn't find Australia on a map. If you explained it to them it wouldn't make sense, and if you got them to try it they probably wouldn't even consider it a food (that's the reaction most Yanks have). So, imagine going from that state to actually finding little tubs of the stuff on the table at a Denny's, or even a Denny's-like place, right next to the grape jelly. How much the world would have to change for that to be possible. Yet you absolutely find little tubs of Vegemite right next to the jelly (called jam, though) in every Denny's-like place in Australia, everywhere you might find yourself while travelling and wanting a simple breakfast because your tummy's been a bit funny. In that culture, it's absolutely normal and expected, and in this one it's so unlikely that it boggles the mind. Hence, there are still cultures, we're not all in one mono-culture.

Online too much?

I've noticed that I've started using "frowny face" as an expression in casual conversation. Mostly in my own head, but I'm sure it will start out loud soon enough.

For example, I was driving back from Milwaukee to Appleton in the grey drizzly rain, and stopped to fill the tank up at a Shell station in Slinger, and I opened up the driver's side door to step out to the pump and there was a huge, deep puddle right beside the car, all the way as wide as the door. "Frowny face," I said to myself.

p.s. I did manage to cantilever myself out of the car by stepping on the banks of slushy ice that had not yet melted into the puddle.