Take reading. Three examples of habits in reading:

Anyone who has spent feverish hours racing through a book for an exam or essay — mining for quotes, gorging your short-term memory on major themes, protagonists, plot devices and metaphors in setting — knows there are different ways of reading. Ah, the feeling of holding it all in short-term memory like a drug mule holding heroin balloons in the stomach for prompt regurgitation. Maybe not the best way to cultivate an appreciation of some of the nuances of modern European fiction, but it passes the exam. But there’s a risk of habit: you find that when you’ve got time for some recreational reading, you apply the same practices. Skimming, making mental bookmarks of the major plot points and characters, but disregarding the peripheral characters, ignoring some of the subtler aspects of dialogue, and coming away with something of a caricature of the real book.

While studying for my Masters, nearly all the reading I was doing was articles, essays and single chapters. Very little extended reading (I think the only novel I read over the course of my Masters was The Princess Bride, and I’d already read it). By the time I got to the end of those studies, I felt like a novel was a huge undertaking: I’d formed the habit of reading only chomp-sized, digestible-within-an-hour pieces. It took a while to work my way back up to book-length texts. (I was shocked to find that a 5,000-6,000 word article in The New Yorker, while completely gripping, required lots of hydration breaks and took me nearly a whole morning.) I had fallen out of the habit of sustaining focus and interest over a long reading period.

I edit legislation for a living, which involves another specific type of reading: the way I read legislation when I’m editing it is vastly different to the way I read a novel or a blog.  When I’m editing, I’m looking for errors; I’m looking at sentence structure, order of words, formatting, punctuation, etc. Additionally, I don’t have a legal background, so sometimes the topic of the legislation doesn’t hold my interest and I don’t take in meaning as well as I otherwise would. These two factors mean that I’ve developed a habit of reading in such a way that part of my mind can, to a limited extent, wander off and do its own thing while the other parts are skimming text and superficially absorbing it. I hadn’t realised how pervasive this habit had become until I caught myself doing it while reading in bed. Reading in bed! A book I genuinely wanted to absorb and learn from and drink in, and only 1/5th of my brain was bothering to show up for work!  The other 4/5ths were thinking about groceries, singing some tunes that had gotten stuck in there, asking dumb questions and generally putzing about pointlessly.

Three habits of reading, each carefully refined by circumstance. My brain had been all “right, so this is what we do all the time now, so this is what I’ll get good at!”.  Clever little brain. Have a treat.  No, not on the…oh, never mind, I’ll clean it up later.

While these three habits were useful — they wouldn’t have developed if I hadn’t needed them at the time — other reading habits deteriorated: picking up a novel put aside for a few days, it was hard to remember what happened previously and why the characters were in the situation they were in. The third habit — skimming and not concentrating — is the most powerful one at the moment, and so the one I want most to push aside. Still, awareness is the first step to correction. Now I know I do it, I notice when I’m doing it and pull myself back into line. If I get to a point in a book and think “when did she become El Presidente?” or “who was that guy again and why is he holding a donkey’s head?” it’s time to flip back and retry those couple of pages.

All three of these habits formed out of circumstance, but I don’t want them anymore. My favourite reading habit is sustained reading, where I absorb the text, learn about people, ideas and events (fictitious or real), and maybe even grow a little as a result. This is the habit I want to preserve: happily, the best way to sustain it is to keep doing it.  That’s something I can get behind. I’m a greedy reader (a greader!) and there are so many things I want to read, but if I’m skimming, not concentrating, or data-mining, I’m kidding myself. I’m not listening to what the book’s got to say, and when I get to the end of the book, all I’ve got is a deceptive sense of conclusion. Reading is a lot like listening, I think: people assume they’re good at it because they do it all the time, but most people aren’t doing it at all. They’re just looking at words.

I’ve just finished reading Sylvia Plath’s first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems.  I dabbled in Plath as per the requirements of a high school course when I was in Year 12, but never really got into her stuff: I didn’t mind her poetry, but The Bell Jar was too heavy for me at the time.  And I reached uni at a time where she was pretty unpopular, so any mention of her name usually elicited eye-rolling, which made it even easier to reject her stuff outright. But! Time does strange things to your head, I suppose, and I decided to give her another go.  And I’m really glad I did.  Colossus has been mind-blowing; the sharpness and forcefulness of the imagery is rocking my world, especially the contrast between images relating to nature — gardens (especially neglected gardens: The Burnt-Out Spa, The Manor Garden, Departure), animals (Sow, Blue Moles) and wilderness (coastlines, cliffs, rocks and boulders: Hardcastle Crags, Lorelei, Man in Black, A Winter Ship) — and images relating to buildings, people and constructions (Night Shift, Medallion, Snakecharmer, Suicide Off Egg Rock).

I found it really good to gently chip away at this book, taking in just one poem and thinking about it for a while, going back and forth over it until I really felt like I grokked it. Then I would move on to another one; I often found myself flicking back after reading a later poem and re-reading the earlier poems with the later poem in mind, giving me a different perspective.  As a result, despite approaching the collection as something I could nibble at between chaotic episodes at work, I got a really strong sense of cohesive themes, which it a ripe sense of unity and wholeness. I think it takes a lot of skill to work with a group of closely-related themes and image motifs in poetry and not have it come out sounding like a gift-shop collection. (Oh, you know the sort of thing: “A Posy of Poems for Gardeners” or “A Quilt of Poems for Patchworkers”. Gag me.

I suspect reading poetry is a slightly different skill to reading, say, fiction or essays or blog posts, and I’ve reached a stage where I want to develop that skill more.  Whenever I had to study poetry in high school or uni (and it was always “had to”), I could understand what the teacher wanted us to look for, and when they walked us through a poem, I could see the points they were trying to make — but poetry never really spoke to me and I’ve never really read it recreationally. But something in the grey pulp of my head seems to have clicked (or squelched) and it’s making more and more sense to me now.  And I want more!  I’ve been playing around the edges of the Poetry Foundation’s website, which is interesting and cool and, I think, a good gateway to finding other poets and poetry. I feel a bit like I’m dabbling in the shallows of a very big, very beautiful coral reef.

Artist's depiction

(The capsicum bushes were a big selling point. Drawn in gimp.)

M and I have been nestling into our new territory by cooking.  On our first weekend, M made a gloriously tasty batch of croissants. Ooooh, croissants: you taste even better when you are made in celebration of a new oven.   He has been keeping us well-supplied with hand-made pasta, pizza doughs and many many loaves of rye bread.  (I have been in charge of making ice cubes.)  Cooking is such a soothing process, for both of us, and exploring the potentials of a new kitchen and workspace has been a very important part of establishing ourselves in our new context. I find moving a really challenging process, and after all the dust has settled I feel kind of…filleted. So cooking gives me a way of finding my feet. And, in some weird way, it lets me re-establish my context: it’s as though there’s part of my brain that says “aha, this must be home, because she’s cooked muffins”.

One of the first things I made was some long-missed chai syrup.  I was out of some of the usual ingredients — cloves, ginger and cinnamon being the big absentees — so I altered it a little.  In addition to the standard black tea base, I used a generous measure of Earl Grey leaves; then added some mandarin zest and a squirt of mandarin juice.  These two modifications gave a fantastic citrus twist.  I used a lot of allspice, nutmeg, some bay leaves, and a little bit of garam masala to add the required spiciness, then simmered it all for a while until it was thick and syrupy.  While it cooled, I stirred in plenty of honey and vanilla extract and left it to cool.  It’s beautiful: I love that chai is one of those things that you can play around with according to whim and circumstance. There’s a lot of scope for experimentation.

The smell of spices while cooking both soothes and excites me.  It calms me and makes me feel creative and alert and I love it.  So it is unsurprising that the next thing I made was spicy roast vegetable and lentil soup.  Aw, baby, this was a good one, albeit tricky to photograph.

Spicy and steamy

Two small potatoes, some wedges of pumpkin, two carrots, a purple onion and a brown one, all rubbed with olive oil, salt and some chilli powder and roasted in the oven; right at the end, add a few cloves of garlic and roast only briefly.  Meanwhile, finely chop some celery, carrot and shallots and quickly fry in some butter and salt.  Have a litre or so of vegetable stock on standby, with some bay leaves in it. Roughly chop the roasted vegetables and toss them into the pot with the celery/carrot/shallots, then lightly fry the whole lot.  Add your spice mix: mine had (from memory) tumeric, cumin, coriander seed, garam masala, cardamom, nutmeg, cayenne pepper (and plenty of it), white pepper and mustard powder, and I needed a lot more than I originally thought I would. Throw it in and stir the vegetables around in it, until they get dry and spicy and very aromatic; the smell of the frying spices will fill your kitchen and sinuses.  Pour in your stock, make sure it covers the vegetables, and then throw in some generous handfuls of dried red, yellow and green lentils.  I soaked my lentils for a little while before chucking them in, but if you don’t, make sure you keep a close eye on how much water they suck outta the soup. They’re thirsty little blighters. Taste the soup regularly to make sure it’s flavoursome enough: you may need to top up the salt levels as you go, especially if the lentils go in dry. Let it simmer.  Eventually everything will have merged into a glorious, spicy, hot pulp of vegetables and you can mash it roughly or puree it with a blender.

This soup was fantastic.  I miss it still. And it was wonderful to have such a spicy, hot, flavoursome thing to serve with M’s homemade rye bread when our erstwhile housemates came over for dinner.

(a) Discovered our new house had a dishwasher well after our offer had been made/accepted/initial deposit laid.Who knew? Thing is, you couldn’t see it in the photos online and on the day of the Open House, there were too many people cluttering up the kitchen for us to really get a look in.

(b) In the first week after moving in, we discovered:

• A skylight! In the kitchen!
• A doorbell! (When someone rang it.)
• A mirror on the back of the bedroom door!
• A vegetable patch!
• Where the fuse box is!

(c) A currawong stole one of my socks off the clothesline.  Swooped down, examined it, then picked it up and flew away, despite me dashing onto the back porch crying “No, stop, that’s my sock!” (as if the currawong would say “Oh, is it? Sorry, my bad.” and put it back).  This is, I think, one of the cutest and funniest things to happen to me ever. This may not be evidence in terms of my basic inability to evaluate real estate, but it is evidence of my basic inability to use pegs.

I want to just have a little gloat: having looked at a lot of Open Houses while we were searching, we knew as soon as we walked up the driveway that this place was a good one.  We were surly, cynical and tired — you might say I was wearing a particularly black wool hat that day — and as we drove over we agreed that this house would have to be something special to even tempt us.  And it did.  All that other stuff, the little details we’re only just discovering as we settle, are completely inconsequential in the face of the fact that the house resonates so strongly with us both.  It’s the house for us, no question.

Also, I think I’ve got a handle on why moving is so thoroughly discombobulating.  It’s not just the physical demands of reshuffling all your stuff, the packing and unpacking, etc. It’s the process of mapping your mind to a whole new physical context.  M’s dad pointed out that all the tiny jolts you hardly notice, like getting up in the night and not being 100% sure where the light switch is, are tiny disruptions to your resting mind that tire you out.  And that got me thinking about how we come to rely upon physical places as reassurances and as context.  I suspect most people have markers of some sort of boundary that reassure them and make them feel grounded.  For a lot of people, it’s their house, obviously, but for others — those with a turbulent home life, or sharing their home space with a lot of people, or with a different way of looking at the world — it can be a workplace or even their car.  Travellers fix on their hire cars or their tents or their backpacks or a talisman (like a teddybear or something) of some sort.  I think it’s a pretty natural impulse, when the stress of change or unfamiliar environments or excitement starts to shake up the mind a bit. It’s like finding the bottom of the riverbed after you’ve been turfed out of your kayak: once your get your toes in the sand, you know which way to go.So I started to see home as context, the place I’m surrounded with reminders of who I am and what I value — things like what food I keep on standby or the logical arrangement of toothbrush/toothpaste/hairbrush on my bathroom sink. And that’s why moving shakes you up so much: you have to realign all that stuff, relearn it, and get used to a reconfiguration of all those reminders.

I celebrated this breakthrough by redyeing my hair and casting on a pair of extra-thick boot socks. Reestablishing my context, indeed.

I know, you’ve got a whoooooole day to squander.  Plenty of time, right? You can cook, knit, do the sudoku, do the cryptic crossword, and still have heaps of time left over.  Plenty of time for writing/whatever thing you were going to do today.

Probably not.  I have this conversation with myself nearly every weekend.  I start working on a crossword over breakfast, and then the next thing I know it’s 12:30, I’ve done nothing but drink endless cups of tea and doodled in the margin of the paper. Time wanders away from me like a bored cat when the string it’s playing with goes limp, vague sense of disgust and all.  I’m of two minds about this: one is that, well, I subscribe pretty heavily to the belief that rest and idleness aren’t the same thing: that just because I haven’t written as much as I had planned (or knitted, or cooked, or whatever) doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve wasted time.  I think resting and moving slowly and quietly are really valuable things and good for the brain.  But on the other hand, I’ve got goals I want to get to, and I’m not going to get to them without concentrating on actually, y’know, doing shit.

My To Do lists are a bit stupid, too.  I inevitably cheat and pad them out with things I’ve either already done or really will do anyway, so that I can tick their boxes and feel smug that I have completed “make to do list” and “brush teeth”.  Plus, they get out of hand quick and then get too long and a bit overwhelming, so I end up losing them somewhere over the course of my day, and playing hours of Auditorium instead.  (Actually, just posting that link was risky: I nearly got sucked into playing it again. But man, what a fantastic game.)  I can’t be the only person who has this problem, because the net is chokkers with productivity “tools” and advice sites.  One of my favourites is now do this, which lets you put in a list of things to do, and then it flashes them up to you in your browser, one by one.  As you finish, you click “done” and it goes to the next one. The idea being, of course, that you focus on just one task at a time and chip away at it until it’s done.  (What a novel concept.)  But for me, this has the same problem of getting overwhelming: I quickly end up with a huuuuge list and feel uneasy about it and go off and do something else entirely.

Over on Zen Habits, the author Leo recommends choosing just three things in your day that you want to get done; your Most Important Tasks or MITs.  This is getting a little bit too, uh, “management” for me, but there’s a lot of value in the idea that you forcefully limit your To Do list to just a couple of things and concentrate on those.  My problem has always been that I end up spending an hour or so deciding which of the many things I’d like to do qualifies as a Most Important Thing.  Bam: time suck.

Just before starting this post: I put some bread on to rise, began roasting some vegetables for the soup I’m making, and got halfway through yesterday’s sudoku, which is now sitting next to me on the floor (normally I have some knitting with me as well).  I tell myself I’ll do some writing while the bread rises/vegetables roast, and that I’ll doodle on the sudoku (or knit a few stitches) “while I’m thinking”.  What kind of bullshit is that?  I am not a multitasker.  My Mumini is, to a spectacular degree, but I am not.  I have to do one thing at a time, and it’s probably best that I just accept that.  Actually, it’s strangely liberating to remind yourself that there is a hard limit to how much you can do in just one day, or just one weekend, and proceed at a more comfortable pace.

So, how am I going to get around to any of the things I want to get done? By stopping. I’m going to close the RSS feed reader; close my email program (I just spent ten minutes deleting old emails, what a waste of time); and just open up my text editor and write.  I’ll keep an eye on those roast vegetables, too, but mostly I’m just going to write.  I’m not going to try and knit, surf the web, do the sudoku or anything like that while writing: I’m just going to write.  This is a novel plan for me. (Hah! Write! Novel! Geddit? Ah, nevermind, you’ll figure it out.)

Fig. 1: Artist's depiction

I have always used doing the washing as a procrastination tool: I hate that I do it, since I don’t like washing and I don’t think washing every single weekend is necessary or even useful, on the whole, but there you go.  I sit down, an empty block of time on my hands, and open up the file I’m supposed to be working on — and then, ooh, what do you know? I really must go and do the washing!  I hate it, and I’ve struggled to neutralise it, even when I can see it coming.  I won’t even ask for help, even if there’s heaps of washing to be done and the help would be readily and cheerfully provided.  Instead, I just stomp around, resenting the washing machine and its relentless consumption of my weekends and free time.  Which is hardly fair.  My washing machine is no monster, despite me calling it one all the time. It’s just me, being stupid and failing to prioritise properly.  If you were to ask me “which is the more important job for the day: getting all the washing finished or writing up that short story you’re thinking of?” I would say short story, but I would do the washing.  And then I’d get pissy about the state of affairs I had manufactured, wherein I run out of weekend and do not get any story written, short or otherwise.

And then the feminist guilt would get me.  I’d ask myself if all my fiery suffragette predecessors had risked social ostracisation, jailtime or worse just so I could spend my weekends washing work clothes, answer “no”, and get pissy with myself for failing them as well as myself.  Oy, the drama. The most frustrating part of it all was that I knew what I was doing — I could see the pattern in my head, I could see what I was doing wrong, but it was just so heavily entrenched in me to do washing every weekend, that my responsibility to it should be a higher priority than any ambition or creative pursuit, that I struggled to push it away.

I had a revelation while travelling in New Zealand. I had lots, actually, but this is the most relevant one right now.  When I couldn’t remember if I had worn something in my suitcase or not: if I can’t tell the difference by smell, no-one else can either.  While I am not employing this principle to the same degree in my daily life as I did while travelling, it did make me stop and think. My clothes mostly don’t get that grubby, unless I’m exercising (and I change for that) or unless I actually slop something on myself (granted, this happens frequently).  On the whole though, I can get a few wears out of everything without anybody noticing or sticky-taping signs to the back of my chair or anything. So I’m doing less washing, because I’m wearing things more times before I wash ‘em.  No biggy. It’s working a treat and my weekends rock a whole lot more. I’m astonished at how much more free time I have, and this is reconciling me to how much of my precious, short, finite time the washing machine has already eaten.  It’s crazy.

And if you think it’s gross, you just stand closer and tell me.

Dudes, New Zealand is an incredible place. M and I spent January there, and we saw a lot. The biggest highlight was Fiordland, the World Heritage area on the south-west of the South Island.  It’s the most beautiful, dramatic, glorious place I’ve ever seen.

Look at it!  Man, isn’t that incredible?  Sweet Jesus, what a fantastic sight. I’m getting all wistful now.

Anyway, you’ve got to go.  New Zealand is incredible.  It was a wonderful trip: eye-opening, exciting, and demanding.  We walked as much as we could, all over the cities and all over the short tracks in Fiordland — hours every day. I thought a lot about travel and why I love it, and I thought a lot about how much stuff I did without and didn’t miss at all while we were travelling — which lead to a whole lot of thinking about what’s necessary and needful in my life, about where my priorities are, and all that kind of stuff. Interesting, if only to me!  The bring-home message is that I’d like to live on less: I kept wondering why there were so many things I did while at home that I saw no need to do when I was travelling.  If I can do without them while travelling, why can’t I do without them at home?  There’s so much excess and too many things to attend to in my stumpy little life sometimes, and I’m going to practice putting some of them aside in favour of quieter and richer things.

Getting home was a bump, as it always is: I was ready to come home by the end of the trip, but I brought a new perspective home with me and that has made me more critical of some parts of my life.  (On the flipside, it’s made me less critical of others, so that I’m hopefully maintaining a steady average of criticalness.) Plus, it’s always tricky to readjust to the realisation that you simply cannot spend every day eating delicious toasted muesli in cafes, bushwalking through alpine national parks and enjoying New Zealand pinot noir. That’s a rude shock.

But anyway, I’m back.  And it’s nice to be home, where my bed is, and touch base with my friends and family.  But if the offer came up, I’d bolt again in a heartbeat.  Dudes, you’ve got to go.  NZ is heaven.

Holy cow, I just remembered I finished my Masters in June!  That’s what I was doing.  I didn’t notice it so much while tits-deep in my studies, but when you’re studying, everything you’re reading is in topically-relevant chunks.  One week you read four articles and two essays and a study all about one particular facet of whatever stream of study you’re doing.  Then, recreationally, I was kinda tired of reading, so I just stuck to blogs and articles online — things I could chomp and digest in the space of 5-20 minutes.  Any more than that, I got bored and wandered off (as my generation is apparently notorious for doing, if you read anything about demographics written by someone over the age of 40 at the moment; honestly, it shits me to tears).  Then, after my Masters, suddenly there was time and, perhaps more importantly, space in my head, for a sustained, lengthy narrative.  Welcome back Novel!  It’s been a while.  I missed you!

So the past six months I have been reading up a storm.  I’ve reread old friends like Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels and Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection, and made new ones like Lolita and Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.  I’ve discovered Lucy Knisley and she’s inspired me to chase up more comic/graphic novels if I can get my mitts on them, I’ve been reading articles and essays about reading (Nick Hornby’s The Complete Polysyllabic Spree was an awesome discovery at the second-hand book fair, as was When Books Die, an Australian collection of essay about what reading and books mean to people — absolutely fantastic) and I have been loving it.

It’s been fun and interesting and I cannot believe I went so long without reading this way.  It’s like…I don’t know. Rediscovering toast or milk or tea or something so fundamentally pleasurable and kind to the mind that I am astonished I could have done without it for so long.

The other unexpected pleasure has been finding out what extra reading does for your writing.  It’s like fuel.  The more you read, the more you write.  And by ‘you’ I mean ‘me’.  Or ‘I’, since that is grammatically correct.  I’ve noticed that when I’m struggling to write, when I can’t think of ideas (you’ll notice these patches mysteriously coincide with long silences on this here blog), I need to top up my brain with more reading.  Like I need to drink lots and lots of words before I have enough in my head to start rearranging them and writing them back out again.

One final unexpected discovery was the realisation that there is such thing as reader’s block.  I discovered this after a spree of reading — roaring through novels in a matter of days — when I picked up D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. I’ve tried D.H. Lawrence before and found him pretty dry going, so I don’t know why I thought this would be any different.  Maybe it was the cunning cover, which managed to subtly suggest an undercurrent of erotica?  I haven’t gotten further than a couple of chapters, so perhaps this comes out a bit later.  Anyway, it was a complete block.  I found it hard to concentrate on, and then when I picked up another book instead, I felt guilty about reading that, so I wasn’t reading anything at all.  Then I noticed that there were no reading police — no big warning posters reminding me of the wages of betrayal of a book — and decided, fuck it.  Back into Hercule Poirot. Unblocked, the reading spree started all over again.

Good to be back in the reading saddle, I have to say.

Beans!  Delicious, recently-roasted Alan’s Blend from Coffee for Connoisseurs, waiting to be ground.  I’ve ordered from there a few times and I heartily reccommend the Espresso Cioccolato.  What has this to do with NaNo, you ask?  Well, if you asked, then I think you may need to look into your heart and find out how committed you really are to NaNo. How, I insist on knowing, are you maintaining the energy to keep charging on with those thousands of words?  What do you do when you desperately need a break, but honestly can’t go to the toilet one more time?

I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker until a couple of years ago, and then M began roasting his own beans and I learned that all those times I had told people I didn’t like coffee, I just meant I didn’t like crap coffee.  I like really good coffee, which is surprisingly hard to come by in Canberra.  Or maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.  A cup of coffee every morning with breakfast is not essential, but it’s certainly very nice.

I broke my camera this week.  The lovely big LCD screen on the back of it isn’t working properly.  Far from this putting me off photographing things, the added level of mystery this has given my photography is encouraging me to take way more shots than I otherwise would.  And I still love that macro setting:

Can’t you just smell it? Wouldn’t a cup go down smoothly right about now? And then you would have so much energy for banging on with NaNo!

Walk the dog until she’s exhausted (lightweight):

and then dress her up in your latest baby knits: