Not faking it anymore

Last week the fragile crown on a front tooth snapped for the third time in three years.  I was eating toast, which had the crusts cut off as usual in order to minimise the risk to that very tooth, but it broke anyway.  It's a familiar feeling by now, the veneer coming loose, and I calmly spat out my mouthful, extracted the detached chunk of fake tooth and carried on with my breakfast.

Every other time this has happened I've essentially panicked- not because it's painful or dangerous but because I'm worried about how other people will react to my gappy smile.  Fearful that I would look ugly and weird and worse, that I could not pass for middle class professional just by putting on nice clothes and makeup.  Losing that option has always felt untenable before, while piecing together contract work, moving from housesit to sharehouse or establishing new friendships in new cities.

This time its different.  I'm secure enough to know that now my livelihood,  my home and my social networks are not at risk because I resemble a caricature of poverty.  Oh, I know its ugly, especially with the steel post and grey amalgam filing exposed on the remaining half tooth.  There are no photos on this blog for good reason.  I'm vain enough to put my hand over my mouth when I laugh, but not vain enough to beg an emergency dental appointment.

The irony is that my dental health has never been better. I just had a A+ checkup a few weeks ago which amazed my dentist who is used to doing multiple filings every time he sees me. I showed him the book I'm following: Cure Tooth Decay by Ramiel Nagel and he was very impressed with the results. Remineralising my teeth through my diet is so empowering that when this crown broke I was able to understand it as a purely cosmetic prosthetic.  The absence of half an incisor has little or no effect on my chewing (the two molars missing on the other side have a far greater impact and I've left that gap for a decade because its not visible).

Nothing screams 'poverty' like a space in the front of your mouth, and I don't think of myself as that kind of poor. But I have higher priorities this month than to find another $400 for a crown that I have to mollycoddle with crustless toast and which will break off again within a couple years.  I certainly am not going to borrow thousands to remove the existing tooth and get an implant.  I can no longer be bothered with the pretense that I am financially middle class. In my new neighbourhood, which has a 30% unemployment rate, missing teeth are not unusual.

Learning to speak clearly around the gap is an interesting challenge that makes me sympathetic towards toddlers. It's actually quite demanding have to shape tongue and lips in unfamiliar ways while thinking and communicating at the same time.  I spent the weekend with a group at Lake Tarawera and practiced talking lots, mostly inconsequential chit chat.  My good friends graciously did not comment on my changed appearance at all (except once, to say how it enhanced my Billy Idol impression). The people newly met didn't seem repulsed by a woman resembling a grafitti'd photograph and engaged me in some of my most thought provoking conversations of the weekend.

The thing about this broken tooth, now that I'm not freaked out about the social consequences, is that it actually feels pretty good. It is such a relief to eat hard crunchy food without fear, because the worst has already happened.  I quite like the hiss of air across my tongue.  And best of all there's a sneaky sensual pleasure in the way my tongue caresses the silky inside of my lip through the small gap.

The Secret revealed

I won't bore you with my lifetime history of dental trauma, but let the phrases 'panic attacks' and 'resistance to analgesics' provide some context for this triumphant story.

My last one and a half dentist visits have been easy, relaxing and if not exactly pleasant, then at least not unpleasant. Today I almost fell asleep several times, that's how relaxed I was.

The difference is not in the dentist, but in my mind. Half-way through the writhing agony of my second-stage root canal I had this thought: wouldn't it be nice if dentists arranged for a foot masseuse to work on the other end of our body while they did their drilling? And I started to imagine, in exquisite detail, having my feet massaged. So absorbing and delightful was this fantasy that I was surprised and a little miffed to have it interrupted by the end of my dental treatment.

So when I went back for stage three today, I launched into my foot massage visualisation as soon as I settled into the chair. This time I included skillful reflexology and Body Shop Peppermint Foot Cream, and kept it going the whole session, eventually extending into some Thai massage all the way to my buttocks. I would have drifted into sleep a few times but for some pesky drilling.

It is possibly the first time in years I haven't had to stop dental treatment for second and third helpings of painkillers that just didn't seem to work. How miraculous to have my mouth functioning again within an hour of the session finishing, and not to have my jaw aching from so many needle jabs. The most traumatic part of the whole experience was paying for it (which as it turns out was due to this).

It seems too good to be true, but it is truly too good a secret not share. Next time you go to the dentist, I recommend a DIY imaginary foot massage, it makes all the difference.

Cape York Pt 4- Fire Forests

I inhabited a vivid tropical rainforest landscape in my imagination long before I ever came to the Daintree. No such anticipation prepared me for the dry sclerophyll forest that characterises most of the Cape York that I saw.


My eyes, saturated with five months of Cape Trib's chaotic greenness (on top of a lifetime of New Zealand's verdant pastures and olivey dense bush) were shocked by the dominance of brown, grey, orange and black in the landscape. It took me until Weipa (near the end of the trip) to begin to understand that there is a unique, stark, beauty to this dry open forest.

Scorched pandanus seeds

The Language of Forests tells me that dry sclerophyll forest "can survive a fire; although the crowns of the trees may be burnt, they will regenerate from epicormic buds buried within the bark. Species of the understorey may recover from fire by shooting from underground rootstocks. Dry sclerophyll forests are characteristic of soils of low fertility."

Notes from my journal:

Cape York is the driest place I have ever seen.

We are driving through an eerie landscape of dead grass,
widely spaced spindly gum trees
and endless termite mounds,
like gravestones,
like castles,
like ruins.

Inside a termite mound

It's an apparently lifeless landscape.
The few cattle we see, silvery brahmins, are so rare that they appear like a mirage.

Termites on charred bark

I don't know if I can write poetry here on Cape York.
I don't have an emotional involvement,
I am only passing through,
glancing around without committment.
Without love there isn't much poetry.

And anyway, this place beggars the language
(as Apsley Cherry-Garrard* said about Antartica)

The forest by the beach in Weipa is a strange deserted landscape. I am the only one here. Me and some burnt bicycles.


Smoke on the horizon
smouldering landscape
crisp, scorching, charred.

Brown and grey smoke
billowing up out of the mangroves
skimming the horizon
across Albatross Bay.

I am choking on the testosterone in the air.


It's very open where the fire has been recently
but elsewhere its dense with long dry grass.

I took charcoal rubbings of iron bark, a smudgey maze.

Coen

Last day, Coen, on the rocks:

What is this firehorse to make of this fire forest,
smouldering into stark beauty?

What a long line of sight between the trees:
it is a place to aim far.
Aim big, this place tells me, and don't act alone.

I bring my arid heart
to this arid land
and set fire to my feelings.

To look through the fire forest
is to see myself from afar:
the undergrowth flared off,
scorching my stiff scars
setting off my untamed heart again
thump thump thump
leaping across the landscape like a kangaroo

There is such sweetness here in the regenerating green
life comes bursting out of the ashes
like water sparkling between rocks.


______________________________

*Author of The Worst Journey in the World, possibly the best book title in the world.

Cooking with Tropical Fruit

Star Fruit

How many times have I intended to write a post about tropical fruit? I think I've procrastinated in part because I have yet to get enough really good fruit photos to illustrate. Well, that may never happen, due to the tendency for fruit to get eaten before it is photographed. So you'll have to make do with the photos that I do have.

Dragon Fruit growing on its cactus plant

Some of the fruits are more luscious looking than they taste (e.g. dragon fruit) and some taste best when they look really really bad (e.g. sapote and papaya). Some fruits are freaky looking but kind of bland (e.g. rambutan), and some are pretty ordinary looking and taste sublime (e.g. mangosteen). And here in the tropics where the fruit can be picked ripe and eaten fresh, familiar fruits such as pineapple, lychee and mango taste completely different, and infinitely better, than the (in retrospect) awful imported versions I knew in New Zealand.

Unripe mangosteens

At Rainforest Hideaway B&B, my wwoofing duties are not onerous and my favourite jobs are preparing breakfast for the guests in the morning and dinner for Rob and myself in the evening. Breakfast here includes a platter of tropical fruit chunks which this week has included mame sapote (aka pumpkin pie fruit) and black sapote (aka chocolate pudding fruit).

Tropical Fruits Breakfast Platter
(top row: honeydew melon, mame sapote; middle: pinapple; bottom row: dragon fruit, rollinia, star fruit; sub-bottom row: banana)

Like many of the tropical fruits, sapotes seem to be extremely variable in flavour depending on the specimen. When you strike a good one, there is nothing better, but an average sapote is, well, pretty average. In texture they are creamy, and in taste they are not particularly sweet, but rather subtly flavoured. Mame sapote when ripe looks like a moldy grapefruit from the outside but the flesh looks like a reddish cooked pumpkin. It has a slightly sweet pumpkin-ish flavour too.
The black sapoteis not as bad looking on the outside (like a granny smith apple) and looks like the darkest chocolate pudding on the inside yet does not actually satisfy the needs of a chocoholic. Every day there's been leftover mame and black sapotes after breakfast to experiment with and see if I could make something really delicious.
Here's what I have discovered. The two sapotes, mashed smooth and mixed together with a tangy plain or vanilla yoghurt, with a sprinkling of cinnamon and a grating of chocolate taste like heaven in a bowl. Alison informs me that mame sapote smoothies are all the rage in Cuba, and that a squeeze of fresh orange juice and a teaspoon of cocoa makes chocolate pudding sapote really live up to its name, but I haven't gotten to try that version due to the lack of both those ingredients in our kitchen.

What the Hideaway kitchen is fully and completely stocked with is pretty much every ingredient known to Thai cookery. I think I'd eaten Thai food maybe twice in my life before this month. My old adverse reaction to the heat of chillies always put me off as I used to get a sore spot between my shoulder blades whenever I ate hot foods but since I stopped with the flour and dairy, I can eat heat- go figure!. In contrast, Rob loves Thai kai so much he attended two Thai cooking schools while vacationing there during the Wet Season this year. He's bought all the makings and has the little cookbooks the school's provided. So, without having any real familiarity with Thai flavours or textures I've started teaching myself to cook Thai, and braving the heat, and enjoying myself.
As well as curries, fish cakes and pad thai I've made the Green Papaya Salad a few times, because green papaya is something that is very readily available in this part of the world. You might have to wait days or weeks for a ripe papaya, but there'll always be a green one somewhere!
Ripe papaya is luscious and sweet and red and squishy (and looks almost rotten from the outside). Green papaya flesh is white and firm and juicy and bland. It grates as easily as carrot and the salad is made by pounding all the raw ingredients in a mortar and pestle and letting the juices seep together... tomato, green beans, fresh chilli, garlic, lime juice, fish sauce, roasted peanuts, and sugar (everything Thai has sugar in it). When I hear the words green and salad, I tend to think of cool and soothing mild flavours. Well, green papaya salad is like juicy fire!

Gut Feelings

I'm pretty sure the first book I ever made as an edition was Dislocation*. It's an accordion fold with simple pop-up panels for the text, illustrated with line drawings with bit of collaged colour. It was laser printed (I was years away from access to letterpress) and since I had no idea of how to make a decent book cover back then, its the simple folded card cover that makes me cringe when I look at it now. But the content of the book is still as strong as it ever was.

Dislocation is a longish poem about travel and homecoming, in particular it's about jetlag, and the profound effects it can have. I included excerpts from the poem in this post, written almost exactly one year ago. A year ago, six months ago, I was still in my profoundly anti-travel state of mind. I really should know better than to ever say never! With my recent trip to Queensland I have done one of my famous about-face total attitude shifts. My own unpredictability is, as usual, keeping my friends endlessly entertained.

In the first day or two back from my January trip, I wrote this little poem with a very different (to Dislocation's) interpretation of the meaning of my jet lag feelings.

Gut Feeling

I left my juice and my heart behind in the tropics.

Vital fluids trailing my obligations by three hours,

I can see them back there, a languid puddle in the heat

With the sea lapping up warm and salty,

saying belong belong belong

here.

Yes my guts are hardly missing me, this empty shell of self

whithering dry and itchy,

All the moisture in me has been cried out.

I work carelessly, distracted

by my chest aching a hole where my heart should be.

And yet I don’t want to call my heart home.

I want to pack up my shell and return to

my centre, my passion, my guts.

* I still have copies of Dislocation available, discounted to $100 because I don't like the cover. Email me at the address on the right.

The beautiful photographs of Dislocation are by Katrina Ching

Messing about in boats

A few years ago, when my friend Sarah started whole-heartedly following her passion for kayaking, I could only summon the most abstract of support and interest for this enthusiasm. I am not sporty and do not feel a great affinity for watery environments. For some reason too murky to delve into I felt particularly averse to trying kayaking.

But I overcame all sorts of fears and aversions to take up swimming this year, and have enjoyed gaining confidence and competence in the water. I learned that I could take on a physical challenge in the same way I take on other kinds of challenges.

Sarah often bemoans her friend's lack of interest in kayaking, and frustration with finding people to go paddling with. So, mostly because I love her dearly rather than any great desire to kayak, I organised a trip for us when she came to stay last weekend. I contacted a new friend, who with her partner, run Pacific Coast Kayaks and booked us on a guided kayaking trip.

In a party of 8, mostly women, we took a leisurely paddle up the Patua Estuary last Sunday. I was in a double kayak with Sarah, and she kept us afloat, going in (more or less) the right direction, and paddled alone when my shoulders packed in.

I discovered I really like kayaking- at least at a gentle pace on calm waters (I can't imagine ever wanting to try white water). I like the sensation of gliding across the silky surface of the sea. I like the gentle splish splosh dripping sounds of the paddling. I like the rhythm. I really liked seeing bush and birds from the water.

Despite my extreme nervousness on my way to the water, once I was on it I felt completely safe. It was nice to be a paying customer and be so well cared for by Mark whose calm competence was utterly reassuring. It was very very nice to be with Sarah and share in her greatest passion. And it was delightful to paddle in and out of the company the friends and family who made up the rest of the party and stop for lunch and coffee on a ribbon of muddy bank among the mangroves.

Despite getting so sore that I couldn't paddle the last stretch home against the wind (luckily Sarah is so strong and enthusiastic that I believe her reassurances that it didn't matter that I became a dead weight), I loved the whole experience and can't wait to go on another (shorter) trip. When I look back at this year of taking on so many new challenges (learning letterpress, taking up swimming, making a career change, putting on a solo exhibition) kayaking will stand out as a sweet surprise for its ease.

Photos thanks to Sharon Ketko (that's me in the blue hat and Sarah in the white cap).

Gifts from de Nile

It's been a week of denial, or rather the gradual erosion of denial. Most startling was the realisation that a whole week has passed since my last post. Really, it felt like only yesterday...

Most famously I was in total denial about the need to do any shopping for the upcoming orgy of gift giving that I feel obliged to participate in. (I bought the most important gift online a few weeks ago and the ensuing smugness obliterated any perspective regarding the other near and dears).

Surrounded by office-mates covering their desks in wrapping paper and filling the air with the farting sounds of cellotape as it is wrenched from the roll still didn't make much of an impression. Until a colleague asked how my Christmas shopping was going. To which I blithely replied that "I'll just stop at a service station on Christmas Eve and pick up a few things on my way to Hamilton".

Goodness! I might as well have announced that I would be convening a devil worshipping ritual in the middle of the Christmas feast. Such outrage! Such incredulity! Such public shaming! Um, guys, I was sort of only joking. But at lunchtime I slunk out, blitzed two of my favourite shops and managed to purchase pleasing gifts for almost all the important folk in less than half an hour, while sticking (more or less) to my budget and my loosely applied purchasing policy of hand made/ NZ-made/fair trade/organic/good cause. And then I forgot all that self-righteous consumer- activism when I was suckered into a bookshop on the way back to work.

Rest assured, friends and family, no service station/liquor store/supermarket gifts will be inflicted by me! I'm afraid though, that on the whole I will be introducing more pretty yet useless objects into your life and so you will have to find somewhere to put them, and probably spend an extra few seconds a year dusting them or find a discreet opportunity for regifting (perfectly acceptable after you've read the books). Oh, and because I left it so late, anything arriving in the USA by post will be, um, more of a Purim gift in timing. Sorry.

I do wish I had been as organised as some of my workmates who are giving dolphins, goats and chickens away (as certificates of sponsorship for various worthy causes). If only I hadn't been in denial, I too would have had enough time to buy on line, and next Tuesday my family members would be trying to look thrilled with a card announcing that someone in the developing world has got a new goat thanks to my anti-consumerism. And so there's one less goat bringing prosperity to a dirt-floored hut somewhere. Sorry about that too.

Anyway, getting into the spirit at this 11th hour I am pleasantly surprised to find myself feeling more enthusiastic about Christmas than I have for a long time. I hope, dear readers, that you all enjoy the time off, the company, the gift giving and receiving, and the special foods as much as I intend to.

Chag sameach!

Still making lanterns...

... but last night I also finished You are Beautiful, Meliors' Scarey Biggest Book Ever.

The catalogues are printed, the posters are up, I've had some embarrassingly good media attention and an emotional meltdown. So really, its just making lanterns left to do, which I should finish tonight.

Folding lanterns only requires about 5% of my attention and I've really had enough of being fully present in this particular now for now, so while I make I'm already looking past the two days of installation and the exhibition opening to what I will get to do next. I'm going to play! Paper-making and C&P press cleaning and writing and drawing and making stickers and... who knows what other fun, bring it all on!

Preparing for Domestic Pilgrimage has required absolute focus, discipline and hard work this spring. Now I am ready for a free-form summer of artistic experimentation and self-indulgent dabbling. I remember being in such a dynamic space this winter just past and how the work I am now completing evolved so thrillingly from that playfulness. I look forward to enjoying the next round even more while bathed in hot sunshine.

Feelin' Frisky!

The frisket works! I went to the hardware store and bought my best guess at a new bolt and suddenly the Arab is getting frisky with the frisket. It just looks like it belongs there, swinging from edge of the platen, and so far in my brief experiments, it appears to do the job which I need it to. Some fine tuning from one of the helpful amateur engineers in my life might help it to work better, as the way it's sitting right now is going make printing paper more slow and fiddly than it should be. But at least slow and fiddly printing is better than inevitable inky paper jams.

Another happy printing development yesterday was the discovery that I can print vinyl stickers i.e. bumper stickers. A friend suggested making 'Addicted to Capitalism' bumper stickers and my mind ran off with the other possibilities afforded by printing sturdy waterproof labels. Experiments involving both white and transparent sticky-backed vinyl are extremely encouraging.

Swim Fan

I mentioned a couple a months ago that I have done an about face in my attitude towards home owning. It seems that I am in the process of overthrowing a number of prejudices that I once fiercely cherished and defended. Today's demonstration of this phenomena involves swimming.

Like many kiwi kids I was given formal swimming lessons and by about 7 or 8 years old I could manage a length or two of the school pool in a thrashing motion that bore some vague resemblance to the crawl or sometimes breast stroke or back stroke. I liked hanging out at the public swimming pool across the bridge from our house, but I didn't really do much swimming there, mostly just solitary play, imagining myself as a synchronised swimmer making endless somersaults in the water.

By high school my aversion to sports of any kind was pretty much complete, wearing a swimming suit was a source of humiliation, and my long, thick hair weighed a tonne when wet and took at least 4 hours to dry. So all in all, swimming became a rare and not very attractive activity. There was a brief interlude of early motherhood when taking my daughter to the pool was an excellent thing to do, but sitting in the toddlers pool doesn't really count as swimming for grown ups does it?

Fast forward through a couple of decades of excuses (I don't like the chlorine, the water's too cold, I won't have time to dry my hair properly etc) to January 2007. I had spent New
Year's Eve alone with a hole in my foot from falling on a pronged garden tool that afternoon. For the next two weeks I avoided walking, usually my main exercise, and while I was lying around I brainstormed alternative exercises that wouldn't involve my left foot in any weight-bearing commitments. The idea of swimming swum up from the depths of my imagination, and somehow avoided being snagged on all the reasons I didn't like it. Helpfully, the weather in Northland this month is exceedingly hot, and the idea of immersing myself in a cool, refreshing body of water suddenly had unprecedented appeal.

I found an enthusiastic buddy (with spare goggles), a mutually convenient time and made my first visit to the public pool in Whangarei. I swam six lengths of the 25 metre pool that day, with plenty of rests in between. It took a few lengths before I remembered how to co-ordinate breathing with all the arms and legs flailing about, but eventually it got easier. I was so satisfied with the experience that my buddy and I made a regular swim-date. The second visit was harder work somehow but I made it to 11 lengths (over 1/4 km!) and have set a goal of 16 for next week.

Yes, the chlorine is yucky, yes my wet hair is like wearing a horse on my head for the rest of the evening, yes I'm self-conscious about my hirsute thighs and flabby torso... but now the pleasure of of moving through the water towards my goal of increased fitness carries more weight.

Home Ownership Aboutface

Since I sold the one house I've owned (Dunedin, fifteen years ago) and blew the profit on travelling, I've been a strong advocate of renting (or recently, house sitting). My antipathy to homeownership is the daughter of my financial situation and my priorities. And for various reasons my priority of late has been to not work full time, a lifestyle I have funded with savings that might have been a house deposit in other circumstances.

I recently helped to convince a friend that she shouldn't get over her head into debt to buy her first house in a town where she doesn't really want to live. I dusted off all my excellent reasons to not buy a house. I summoned rationales based on widely known economic discourses such as 'home-ownership is out of the reach of most NZers not already in the market' and 'the bubble must burst, leaving heavily indebted owners with no equity' etc.

But since then I've become slightly obsessed with wanting my own home. It's something to do with the transience of my past couple of years, with finally getting to live in the part of the country I've longed to live in while quixotically* falling in love with a long distance sweetheart, with rediscovering the pleasure of gardening and with a year of living in other people's homes. How often do I aboutface on my strongly expressed positions? Pretty often but don't rub it in. I like to think that I am a flexible, agile, dynamic and responsive Sagittarian Firehorse (thanks, E) rather than a fickle, unstable, unreliable, untrustworthy dilettante.

*I intuitively wanted to use this word here even though I've never used it before, didn't know how to spell it and wasn't sure enough what it meant to publish without double checking. The Consice Oxford definition is such a good description of what I wanted to express that I feel my intuitive vocabulary vindicated. It means (like an) "enthusiastic visionary, pursuer of lofty but impracticable ideals, person utterly regardless of his (sic) material interests in comparison with honour or devotion" (after Don Quixote).