anjelica and kerrie

I started high school in 1977, and attended thus: Form 1, Form 2, Year 9, Year 10, Year 11, Year 12 (when we ‘did’ HSC or Higher School Certificate). If it was explained to us why we leapt from Form 2 to Year 9, I don’t remember the explanation though I suppose it is relatively self-evident (Grade 1-6 in Primary School, Years 7-12 in secondary, though why it’s not therefore Grade 7-12 I can’t imagine). All government schools I was aware of were either primary or secondary, so the break seemed ordinary though I guess there were some private schools that ran straight through 1-12. The weird thing about high school was that whereas in primary you all stayed together, in secondary you had core subjects that you took as a form (or ‘year’) and then, increasingly, electives which you ostensibly voted to participate in though (I can’t remember all the details) in the first and second years I think these were less electives and more just being split up into different groups to participate variously in a range of activities. My school was touted in some quarters as progressive, so that it had a lot of space and facilities for technical aspects eg woodwork art domestic science metalwork. It was a new school and had being going for two years when I started there. It was about 1/3 girls, 2/3 boys. For this reason and others it sucked a big turd in the mud as a school, but that is not what I am here to discuss today. Year 10 was a really interesting year, as it transpired. It would not have had to try very hard, it has to be said, to be more interesting than the previous ones, which were gruelling and depressing (sure I buy into the general perception of the groovy seventies, all natural grain and polystyrene, but when it comes down to it, the seventies for me were completely foul). Year 10 was 1980 and I discovered new wave music (Devo, The Pretenders, John Foxx, Elvis Costello, The Models, The Reels, etc) and became part of a small group of people, boys and girls, who would meet every morning early – before anyone else was at the school, what the fuck were we thinking!!! – and hang out and, you know, rap (in the old sense. Not rapping. Just, uh, talk). We were a morning group only I think – the girls were part of a wider group of girls, probably in truth kind of reject girls or certainly not the coolest girls. And the boys were similar. It was probably written in the stars, not that any of us ended up married to each other, to the best of my knowledge. Actually I don’t know what happened to the girls but I know what happened to one of the boys (aside from me). He ended up alright actually. Actually actually I’m trying to remember who was a part of it all. I recall, for instance, one of the boys in question who was most definitely at the table on the north side of the school building, presumably one morning early, saying he hated the Birthday Party and when asked if he’d heard them saying ‘no, and I never want to hear any of their shit music.’ This was not a joke. But apart from remembering him being there and saying that, I can’t recall why he was there because was he a usual participant in this insane reverse-of-cool brigade? He certainly had the social standing to be so but I don’t otherwise recall him there. More importantly I recall Anjelica (spelling?) and Kerrie, who were friends I guess wherever they found themselves but were not necessarily best friends, if that makes sense. Kerrie was adopted and had some odd attributes, particularly when it came to jokes made against her other friend Jackie, which consisted for instance of hiss-yelling ‘half breed!’ at her. Jackie would just go red and silently chuckle. Anjelica was known to us all as having a fierce crush on a science teacher which was no doubt one of those now, in hindsight, outrageous wastes of energy (I assume) that passed the time in those days. She also really liked Alice Cooper, a well-known singer of the day. She was Chilean by birth and, we were led to believe, was somewhat wealthy and pampered though who knows where these ideas come from, considering that if she was really a princess surely her parents would have sent her to a private school not our dirt farm. Ditto Kerrie in hindsight. Perhaps it suited them to pretend they had more privileged backgrounds than they really did. Two more things I recall about Kerrie: she was the first person I ever saw wear an Esprit top (the three lines and lack of a vertical on the left of the ‘E’ caused me to read it only as ‘Sprit’; more importantly I think it was the first time I recall/ed seeing an item of clothing where the ‘label’, i.e. the brand name of the clothing manufacturer itself, was a major feature of the design of the item). Also, she told me about 3RRR-fm – though I think I already knew about it – in disgusted terms, as a station that only played ‘new wave’ music, as you might describe a radio station where the announcers communicated only in farts. So I can’t really remember what time we got to school, it was early, possibly around 7:45 for a day that started around 8:30, but those times are only guesses. It suited me to leave home early as there seemed to be little for me there and I had begun the long process of exiting from the domestic sphere as much as possible. At a certain point Anjelica and Kerrie would excuse themselves by Anjelica saying she was going to the toilet and asking/telling Kerrie to come with her. Once Kerrie told me that these visits involved Anjelica brushing her hair absently and asking Kerrie if someone or other liked her. Presumably for Anjelica (perhaps both of them) it was time out from the weird world of boys, and perhaps it was the same for the boys. Kerrie and I talked on the phone quite a bit around this time, I can’t remember who called who. She liked a boy called Scott who the first two girls I went out with also went out with, so I guess girls who liked Scott liked me. I wonder when I last saw those girls. A few – maybe 5 – years after I had finished school and perhaps when I was back in my mother’s house for the last time, ‘cleaning up’ (not particularly effectively) before the house was sold, Kerrie called. She sounded a bit drug-addled or perhaps this was an affectation. I somehow got the sense that she had turned gay but who knows, this may also have been affectation, in the way she spoke, and no-one could accuse me of being very perceptive very often particularly about people’s behaviour or predilections. She just kept saying it was weird how we were talking and I was like (thinking) so what, get off the phone. As for Anjelica, I have no idea what happened to her or where she went. It occurs to me that perhaps she didn’t even finish high school or perhaps she did it somewhere else. I certainly know I never saw her again after 1982. I also certainly know I never think about either of them, or rather, I probably go years at a time without thinking about either of them, and I would be fairly certain neither of them ever think about me, either.*

10 September 2021 update. You know what impresses me. Whatever happened to these women - who knows - even if they are on fb now, and they might be, it's hard to tell what people might look like forty years later and also hard to remember what people looked like forty years ago, still, clearly neither of them has the slightest sentimental feeling or wish to connect with our old high school days, and I am very into that, not just because those days sucked, but also because people who obsess about such things also, with rare exceptions, suck. 

laptop musings

August 6 2009

It is very windy. I am at the bus stop at Glenroy waiting for the 542 to Roxburgh Park (well, to Jacana) and getting winded on in a major way. This happened this morning, too. I felt like the screen part of my laptop was going to blow off.

I need a new laptop, actually. I feel bad telling this via my old laptop but it doesn’t seem to be the phrase that unlocks Acer’s patent self-destruct process (yet). This thing is dirty and old and most importantly the screen has a big white-grey band right through the middle of it which is getting bigger and which, I am told, is unfixable though I’m not sure quite why. I know what I really want – a fabulous mac thing – but I won’t be getting it anytime soon, even though I do have superfunds coming through in the relatively near future (tax return, second part of advance on book I wrote purely by being in a zone, etc). Maybe those two together will do it but I suspect all the dosh will just get eaten up in the expenses of being a lousy bad person, which has pretty much been my forte in the last few weeks.

I am now on the 542 going through North Glenroy just near where the train would have once left the main line to go to Tullamarine, if that plan had ever ultimately been followed. Which it has yet to be. Now I am going over the Western Ring Road. It is dark. There are two people on the bus, not including the driver, who is on the bus too.

August 10 2009

It is 20 to 8 on a Monday morning I am en route to the workplace where I have many preparations to make before my class at the end of the day. It is raining lightly (so the laptop was once again subjected to stress, not from rain this time but from light water drops on the keyboard). When your laptop gets to this kind of stage in its life (except, does anyone really know; it’s unknown territory pretty much I would imagine, all they can do is use laptops furiously hoping wear and tear will be like time’s ravages) you are unsure whether it’s an old workhorse that enjoys constant use or whether it needs a long (permanent) sleep. Since all I really use it for is word processing (though there are a lot of images stored on it) I may as well use it until death, though there is always that thorny question of backing up, should I, the answer being yes, but who can be bothered, most of the stuff on here is bullshit. Old lectures, old notes from old projects, etc etc.

(Half an hour later) actually that was pretty interesting. I went through a lot of stuff and deleted heaps. It felt pretty good. Mostly drafts of papers, which seem to go through about 7 or 8 renamings/renumberings before they become fit to be seen as brilliant enough to submit and turn the world on its ear, no-one can ever believe the new insights into early C20 urban history revealed in my incisive text. Perhaps erroneously assumed that stuff I had already had published, I did not need in a word file. Hmm, now I come to think of it, that might be true. And since it’s all pretty easy to back up, maybe that’s what I should be doing, rather than deleting. Oh well, too late now. It’s not like stuff is lost; the worst case scenario is that it would be a hassle to retrieve it (worst, worst case scenario: retype). (Later that evening) It’s really a great feeling to hit ‘yes’ on ‘are you sure you want to delete these 87 items?’. It is dark and raining now and I am on the 401 bus to North Melbourne station. I wish the 401 would stop advertising itself as a new service (18 months new now, I guess). It is 7:17 pm I had a meeting after work which had to be done. Big day. Nothing on tv tonight I think though I have yet to watch back episodes of Rush which I am pleased is on again. You can see them all pixelated on the Channel 10 website. Pixelation looks pretty good. How long before someone evokes/ fakes it in a retro piece of filmmaking?

odd

I note that this ad for something or other on the trains includes a bystander reading a paper which includes a rather large headline referring to the Kerang rail disaster of June 2007 (unless 'Kerang misery haunts victims' has some other, more cheery meaning). Since I am used to assuming every square inch of an ad is something calculated, dub tf?

sugar bird in gisborne

later set free

auckland trip: the unexpurgated diary

July 2 10:50 AM Tullamarine
The grim jokes about air travel are de rigeur at the moment for obvious reasons. There should be another word than 'jokes' though as these are not funny. Anyway. I am travelling to Auckland today and that is fine. I like NZ a lot, and have enjoyed my short forays there, so I expect good times for the next few days. I barely slept last night so I am going around in a bit of a daze and could not handle the razor sharp rehearsed unimaginative repartee of a man trying to sell me a credit card (I think). Money is an issue this morning but I think I have found a way out. Bogeymen just bury themselves in the ground until the problem is over.

So here I am in Auckland Friday 3 July 2009. I woke up extremely early (even notwithstanding that Auckland is two hours ahead of Melbourne) and found myself again chuckling in a way that I cannot fully understand but must be some kind of terrible patronizing cultural superiority that I didn’t think I had in me, viz. I kept finding it terribly amusing that the sun wasn’t coming up. Yesterday I got a little hysterical (kept it under wraps but) that the flight attendant referred to the meal served on the plane as a ‘hot item’. I am pretty sure that she then went on to refer to a cold item but I am not sure. It wasn’t helping that I was watching Flight of the Conchords on the in-flight entertainment. And it was the episode where Jemaine gets an Australian girlfriend and there is a lot of discussion about whether she made fun of his accent.

I went for a walk and found nothing, well, it was too early for most things to be open so that makes sense, and then I went to an internet place and got 20 minutes of internet for a dollar but it kept translating what I wrote into Chinese, which was actually also pretty funny, since I couldn’t figure out (1) how to turn the translator off (2) that, while some way of typing or some words (?!) were not making the translator come off, I don’t know what they were, and so I would just keep rephrasing what I was typing until it didn’t translate into Chinese, which was as you can imagine pretty funny.


the hotel

Also since I had been walking for an hour and not seen any open supermarkets, and since my snazzy hotel has a small kitchenette (yes, a small kitchenette) and so on, and I decided the smart thing to do was get some groceries, I ended up going to a cod-7/11 and getting the most expensive muesli I had ever bought – even allowing for the price difference – and some soy milk which I figured if I had it for breakfast and dinner for the next two days would even out price-wise and who knows, I might even save money over the next option (which is, not eating anything at all).

Later that night – I went for a superwalk to Ponsonby which incidentally is not that rock ‘n’ roll anymore, though it was interesting to see that some small boutiquey bars were totally chockers with peeps, whereas a number of more spacious ones were pretty deserted. What’s that about? Is that SO PONSONBY…? And then I walked back to the hotel, and had a cup of tea and right now I wouldn’t mind a cup of whiskey actually, but I suppose since I am in my pyjamas that’s not going to happen to me. And I kept thinking I was going to find a supermarket and I only found one, which was not much in three hours of walking, and by that time I didn’t much care anymore anyway. As Mia said, you could walk for three hours from central Melbourne and not see a supermarket, if you walked in certain directions (for instance, if you walked towards north Richmond and down Victoria Pde/ Road, you wouldn’t find a supermarket until you got to Victoria Gardens, and that would be about a two hour walk, and you might not even realise that it was a supermarket I guess. Right? Right.) What they have lots of here though are things called superettes. That’s why I started this paragraph with the information that I went for a ‘superwalk’. Funny, yeah.

It was sunny today when I was en conference all day and the newspaper says it is going to be squally for the next week. True. See you tomorrow.

4 July or whatever – happy birthday Guy Blackman – well today was full-on conference day, and nothing particular to report about that, except it’s a pretty decent conference with a lot of variety and a lot of rigour.

Oh and finally (not that I was hoping it would, but there was some tension) it started raining heavily, so that just before the final session of the conf for today it was incredible, and all the way through the final session I was thinking, ‘I wonder if it’s still raining really heavily out there’ because I didn’t bring my raincoat, after joking about it all for weeks beforehand, because everyone seems to think my raincoat is funny because it is lurid. Well, hell. It wasn’t raining when we came out and if it does start I must say I don’t have protection, apart from some decent boots.

I am going to have a few drinks tonight and maybe go to the Wine Cellar. Yes! WINE CELLAR! In K ROAD!


These steps lead to the Wine Cellar from Myers Park, not K Road.

Next day: last night I appeared to have got seriously drunk in a very stupid way, unbecomingly. I regret it but I suppose I will live. I did vomit in the morning. I am now very into Auckland and aside from the vomiting this morning I have had a pretty good day. With two other interested parties (namely Julia and Andrew, old friends from way back) I examined Myers Park, a ‘slum clearance’ (I use the inverted commas because there have been suggestions that the term was applied rather haphazardly to the removal of a few homes, though Julia says she has since uncovered some evidence suggesting that there was a plot to rid the area of its Chinatown) scheme that resulted in the creation of a very attractive park space and the delightful Myers Kindergarten. The northern point of the park ends at a series of steps leading to an arcade, St Kevins Arcade, in which is located the WINE CELLAR! In K ROAD! Which I think I am destined never to visit, or at least, not this time around. Then we went and had a look at some 70s internal reserves in Freemans Bay which were really interesting and we even visited some friends of Julia’s who lived in the area who backed on to one such reserve. Then suddenly it was 5 o’clock and the sun was about to go down and now I am getting ready to go out with the same people for some dinner.

I have to say that while in New Zealand I have now seen two episodes of Hannah Montana and four episodes (while I was sick this morning) of Phineas and Ferb, which is very funny, though I wasn’t laughing because I was feeling so sick, but I could appreciate the skill of it, and liked it. HM is kind of annoying and the only reason I was drawn to it was that on the 8 or 9 channels available to me here, it and other things on the Disney Channel are fiction narratives, whereas practically everything else seems to be reality freakin’ tv, which is not a form I am that fond of. Anyway I now seem to have broken the tv entirely (no I haven’t, but I turned it off about twenty minutes ago and now it won’t come back on) so that’s all fine.

It rained really heavily twice today. Interesting, that.

Next day: great conversation I had with a woman I would frankly describe as elderly in a Te Atatu op shop:
She: That comes to $9, by my account. Is your account the same as mine? It wouldn’t be, probably, because I was educated in Australia.
Me: So was I.
She: Where? Victoria, probably (she said this with a little bit of disdain, she obviously had me figured out, but…) So was I.
Me: Whereabouts?
She: Warrnambool (some discussion of Warrnambool, which I told her I knew well though she brushed it off as something a Victorian would say, then on to a long discussion of how the work ran out in Warrnambool and most of the men in her family took off to South Australia, I can’t imagine when this might have been – the time when there was more work in South Australia than Western Victoria! But I suppose the 1950s? Guessing by her age.)
Me: That doesn’t explain why you’re here.
She: I married a New Zealander!

OK, so that’s not a ‘boom boom’ moment, but it’s OK for now.

It rained heavily thrice today. I forgot rain could be a nuisance. It doesn’t rain for long, but it does rain pretty heavy. Te Atatu was interesting and I went to Freeman’s Bay again. Tomorrow archives.

i need a coffee

I hate both the sound of people saying 'I need a coffee' and the fact that I hate hearing it to the degree that I always have the same stock response, 'You don't NEED a coffee'. It goes down in my hate book (a chunky, inflexible thing) with 'I need a cigarette' and 'I need a(n alcoholic) drink'. I know, I know I'm a totally annoying cross between a pedant and a wowser but anyway... at the moment I need a coffee, inasmuch as, I am in an almost dream state, having not slept that well and then only had rooibos tea this morning because it's going to be a late night and I wanted to pace myself. Rooibos is actually a fantastic beverage, it is delicious and stimulating. But right now I need a coffee if I am going to get anything happening for the rest of the day. I have to (1) finish a 'revise and submit' article (2) get together my presentation slides and (3) finish compiling the reader for my 2nd semester course, which is actually all there, it just needs to be checked once more etc etc. I can't remember ever having a list with such a strong likelihood there in black and white and red of everything close to being crossed off. Along with needing a coffee, it makes me feel a little weak.

getting the job done

It'd be nice to have some information on what exactly is being planned for Broady station aside from 24-hr piping of 'He's so shy' and 'Uptown girl' etc to the station platforms and the recent demolition of the waiting room (rather a vainglorious name, at least, the 'room' part) as at the moment only the occasional warble of 'He's so shy' and/or 'Let's hear it for the boy' (god that's an empowering song) can be heard above the sound of demolition as platform 1 is slowly chipped into obscurity.