Perfect's over-rated

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

-Leonard Cohen

Grace

Valentines Day is a tricky one. It's a day for couples and those in love to celebrate their good fortune. Sometimes smugly. A lot of the hype gets pretty cheesy. But even for those of us who are on our own at the moment, it's still a good chance to think about love and be thankful for what we have.

After all, drop-everything-crazy-romantic love is just one kind of love. We also have the warm, unconditional love of our families. The fun, supportive love of our friends. Never underestimate how good it can feel to love someone (or even something) with no expectation of anything in return. You might adore your job, or that hobby or creative outlet you stay up late at night to work on. You might be smitten with your puppy or obsessed with an old Van Morrison album you just rediscovered on your ipod, or just crushing on the way the light falls on that park you ride your bike through after work. The very fact that you don't know where your next kiss will come from can be something to love! There's so much to love it seems unimaginative to get antsy about all the booked-out restaurants and overpriced floral arrangements of Valentines Day.

I don't generally go beyond the pictures on The Sartorialist, but Scott's post last week (scroll down to Feb 2) on gentleness, gentlemanliness and grace really resonated with me. Grace is something we don't make enough time for these days - small acts of kindness and thoughtfulness that can brighten someone's day more than you know. It's really lovely to go through the comments, where people have written in about the grace and chivalry they find in little actions of their partners.

So this Valentines Day I'm thankful for a lot of things. That I'm with my VERY best friend from my school days, the strongest bravest girl I know. That the most rock-solid couple I know just welcomed their son into the world - and he is going to be the most loved and damn cool kid out there. (I am still hoping he might be named after me!) That Pi is coming home from New York, that Alison is coming home from London, and soon Emily will too. That my sister is loved up with one of the coolest guys I know, that my housemate is loving life and trying to convince anyone and everyone to move to Sydney and share it. That life is good and there are photos to take and words to write and food and wine and laughs to share. That I got to do the couple thing myself, all the messy glorious intense loveliness of it, with one of the most incredible people I know - and that we can still be friends.

So wherever you fit in the single/coupled continuum, happy Valentines Day. Smile at someone cute on the street. Wish an old lady good morning. Let your taxi driver keep the change. Give your mum a call just to say hi. Hold the door for someone at work. There's so much grace waiting to be had - and given. Share the love.

The second city

When I came up with the name for this blog, I was anticipating spending a lot more time in Brisbane as well as Sydney. I love Brizvegas – so many great bars and buildings and back alleys, book-marking memories from boozy uni days – so it’s been sad that I haven’t spent any time there since my summer holidays. Particularly since Brisbane is also home to my second bike, Baby Blue, a powder blue confection of restored treadly prettiness.

It’s a city that’s really well set up for bikes. That track curving around the river is fantastic; at certain times of day when the tide is up, water laps right up to the path… at other times you get that fertile, foetid mangrove mud smell. One of my last nights there I rode with a friend right around to New Farm Park, and the lights reflecting off Story Bridge were spectacular.

To me Brisbane is all about swimming pools, condensation on your beer glass (pots, not schooners), nights of red wine and chain-smoking on balconies, bodies steaming with dancing at the Zoo, hippies at the West End markets, lawn bowls at Merthyr and 3am Bizarre Love Triangle dance-offs upstairs at Ric’s. I don’t think you can do that last one anymore though :(

I love the Brisbane of John Birmingham’s books - his seedy sprawling sharehouses and heat-addled cast of unhinged gonzo characters. When I moved to Brisbane to start uni, I expected my life to turn into another chapter of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand - a dog-eared copy of which I’d pored over as we ground out the last days of our boarding school sentence in Toowoomba. Of course, times had changed, but when I eventually went to a Red Hill party where someone busted out a bucket bong I was like FINALLY! Getting to meet JB has been one of the best perks of my job.

Anyway! Finally making a flying visit back up to Vegas this weekend, to share some anti-Valentines Day beers with a bunch of great mates. Will take Baby Blue out for a spin (she’s now in my baby sister’s custody), do some organic brunch and second-hand-book-shopping in West End, and as many fun Brisbane things as I can fit into two days. So hopefully next week I’ll have lots of great photos from the trails of the second city. Viva Brizvegas!

See the sky about to rain

Soggy times in Sydney tonight... rain dampened our Kuletos cocktails, drizzled while our Korean barbeque sizzled, teemed as we snuck in for a sheesha and closed half the main roads to Randwick with flash flooding.
Will definitely be back to this restaurant again, although perhaps not until the winter months. As it was, amid humidity and then storms, it was the full South-East Asian dining experience - sticky, sweaty, smoky! Best of all was frying our own pork belly to a delicious salty crisp, pickled cabbage and bright green melon iceblocks to finish. It's the kind of place where intoxication could lead to serious injury with your dinner though, with flames and smoke everywhere and buckets of fire being carried past regularly!
We did a kind of school-athletics-carnival-relay-meets-frogger desperate umbrella exchange back and forth across King Street as the gutters flooded. Mine and Ben's final leg met with disaster when I lost my right plugger in the rushing rapids. Thought it was headed for the ocean but managed to grab it in time! We finally got settled on a lengthy table with a bunch of randoms when some genuis drove past too close to the footpath and we all got drenched. There was much squealing, and for some reason flares were let off further down the street. In all, a memorable farewell to Sydney for my star intern who's headed back to Victoria tomorrow.

Rough trade

Let’s not go into why we were there, or how we heard about it. But last night at the Argyle (or as I like to call it, “the cougar den”) we witnessed the Sydney round of judging for RSVP’s search for “Australia’s Hottest Tradie”.

It was a totally surreal experience, a big gender role reversal, to be amidst this sea of catcalling women totally objectifying a handful of men. The people watching was excellent – sorting the women who’d come straight from work from those who’d gone home to doll themselves up! Hunger and lust in the eyes of squealing champagne-bolstered women, who are probably very mild-mannered accountants or child-care providers by day. And I was surprised at the number of guys and gays in the crowd.

The tradies themselves were hilarious – two interchangeable boys-next-door, the 30-year-old who made the mistake of trying to have a personality on stage, the westie wog electrician and a 20-year-old roided-up, stallion-necked poseur. The young’un wanted to win badly, hamming it up pouring water over himself, and looked bitterly disappointed when one of the nice boys won. And did I mention two of the judging criteria, tested by one lucky girl plucked from the crowd, were bicep measurements and “the pinch test”? And there were oh so many tool jokes.

(Cougar in the wild) Meanwhile, there was some kind of amateur round where, in my opinion, the best talent of the evening emerged. A strapping Maori/islander diesel fitter with the face of an angel. When he pulled an aw-shucks grin and his dimples came out like rays of sunshine, 200 women ovulated simultaneously. He faced little in the way of competition, though points for effort to the paunchy bloke with the comb-over. As we left the poor lad was in the middle of a cougar tug-of-war… hope he made it out alive, I daresay he left with the clothes torn off his back!

What could possibly go wrong?

Philadelphia Grand Jury played a cracking free set at Beach Road last night. It was our second stop on a night of snowballing randomness. The first stop I'll write about soon, I think you'll enjoy it. After we left Bondi, this happened:
Aimee unleashed her capoeira moves at the Coogee Bay. There were cartwheels. Wish I'd got more pics of her in action but words can't describe how much I love this photo. I've been sitting here at work doing literal LOLs every time I look at it.

"Make love not war, fuckers"

The lego cold war (read instalment 1 and instalment 2 here) has taken a new and unexpectedly phallic turn. At some point between 1.30am and 5.30am this morning, Anna found the above on her doorstep. Sheets of plain A4 paper, wrapped in alfoil that had been painstakingly carved to read "MAKE LOVE NOT WAR FUCKERS". And as if to illustrate the point, three lego men set into pink, penis-shaped jellies.

Now aside from all the obvious questions - who is it, what is their agenda - what I really want to know is: where on earth do you get a doodle-shaped jelly mould?