On Charity

For those of you who follow these posts and understand that I am not a morning person, you will appreciate the dedication it took to get out of bed at 4.45am, clothe myself and run in the darkness to the train station to catch the 5.45am to Murrarie to partake in the Bridge to Brisbane.  I sat very still and quietly in the carriage and was grateful that there were no loud noises.  However, as we passed more and more stops, and more and more eye candy got on, I perked up considerably. I couldn’t believe the number of people at Murrarie.  Another train pulled in but a minute after the first drew away and the platforms were crammed.  Again at the starting line there were thousands and thousands more.  I couldn’t hear what the loudspeakers were saying so I had no idea what to do, and neither did lots of other lost folk milling around (who presumably did have their hearing).  However I found a queue, shuffled along to the starting line, and finally there was space to run.

The atmosphere was fantastic and I was so delighted to be surrounded by so many healthy people in a country with some of the worst obesity statistics in the world.  The sun came up, showing smokestacks against the dawn.  A man dressed as a dragon passed, holding his disintegrating, green plastic suit.  A truckie honked at us and a pack of girls cheered us on.  There was a tall man in only his multicoloured briefs and sneakers, his Facebook name texta-ed onto his bare back.  Various bands were stationed along the way, playing motivational music. I have a lot of respect for someone who can belt out an 80s tune at 7am in the morning.

By the 5km mark my thighs were starting to hurt but I remained pleasantly distracted by all the fit men.  By 7km even they couldn’t take my mind off my legs.  I stopped for a drink, worried by the waste of the plastic cups littering the ground, which sounded like ice crackling underfoot.  By 8km I was consumed with pain and by 9km I wished I had trained more.  But then we reached the showgrounds and I sprinted the rest of the way.  I found my t-shirt, delivered to me by a friend from work, and limped to the bus stop.  There were no buses from the Gabba for another half an hour so I had to walk home, feeling sorry for myself, but also elated that I had achieved a goal, however mediocre it had been.

There was also, of course, the fuzzy glow of doing something for something else, which is one of the reasons why I work for Autism Queensland.  Yet, since undertaking this venture and pestering people for donations, it has startled me how little people are willing to do to help others.  Last week I bought a Big Issue from a man sitting on his milk crate outside the post office.  I have never bothered with buying a Big Issue before, but he looked so pinched and pale with lack of nourishment that I gave him what was left in my wallet.  As I did so, I realised that even that small amount I gave him would have improved his life, however meagrely.

This post is a final, blatant request for donations to help Autism Queensland with their work in early intervention (fundraising closes tomorrow night).  For those of you who have all your faculties, are able to work, have a roof to live under and enough food and loose change to buy beer or coffee or a bunch of flowers, please spare a few dollars for kids who have a difficult life.  Trust me, you’ll feel better.

On Running

I began this entry after an hour and a half of running along the Brisbane River in the sunshine.  Though I’ve been running for nearly twenty years, I haven’t exerted myself in this way since I first began, when I was 13.  Then, I was prompted by a body-image disorder and an obliterating crush on a boy, but this time the reasons are much healthier: raising money for my employer, Autism Queensland, in this year’s Bridge to Brisbane. I’ve never been good in team sports as meningitis buggered my balance and coordination, so the exercise that I do is always solitary.  Swimming I love for the feel of water on my skin, cycling I enjoy because I am besotted with my bicycle, and running is great because it’s the only time I ever stop thinking.  Instead of trying make connections in stories, or linking up concepts, I concentrate on the pain in my lungs and my knees, the rhythm of my feet hitting concrete and grass, and of pacing myself so I don’t hit the wall too quickly.

I’m by no means a natural athlete.  When I did athletics training after school I was often amazed by the ease with which the girls sprinted around the track while I had to push myself hard to cover the same distance.  However, what I lacked in ability, I made up for with stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness.

It was also while running that I fell in love with Australia.  Every afternoon, after school, I would run the perimeter of the paddocks of our property.  In winter, this meant running in the cold and the dark, but the air was dense and rich from the settling dew.  On the weekend I would take to the hills.  On summer afternoons the sun would pound on my shoulders and pull sweat from my skin, but it also drew out the scent of eucalyptus and the cloying smell of gum blossoms.  There were wild goats, and magpies that divebombed, and the solid block of sound from the cicadas.  To a lonely 13 year old with a disability who was having difficulty adjusting to adolescence, it was a haven.

I still have the drive that girl used to learn social skills, get herself a career and live overseas, and I’m using it again to run for charity.

‘Why don’t you just walk?’ Sister asked.

‘Oh no,’ I replied.  ‘You don’t understand.  If there’s a challenge, I have to rise to it.’

And of course, running 10ks is nothing compared to the struggle kids with autism endure just to get through life.  Autism is a social impairment, which makes it difficult for kids with the disability to read social cues and facial expressions.  They are often isolated, lonely and subject to bullying, which leads to depression and mental distress.  They sometimes have sensory issues which means they can’t, for example, filter sound in a classroom, so they are overwhelmed by hearing every sound around them and can’t concentrate on the teacher’s voice, so their education suffers.  If they can’t learn social skills, nor acquire a decent education, their options in life are drastically reduced.

Autism Queensland desperately needs resources to help people with autism in Queensland, so I ask all my readers to donate generously to this cause here.  I will write an update on how my knees and calves are faring in a few weeks.

On Running and Avatars

After the lugubrious navel-gazing of my former post (this is what happens to writers when they spend too much time on their own; they go mad), I thought it would be nice to inject some jollity into this blog and begin with a joke. Apologies to my married, male heterosexual readers, for this is at your expense: Q: Why are married women heavier than single women?

A: Single women come home, see what's in the fridge and go to bed. Married women come home, see what's in bed and go to the fridge.

O it made me laugh. I love clever jokes. I love all things and all people that make me laugh. When I’m happy (which is often, these days), I sometimes laugh myself to sleep.

Sister returned this week, with dogs but sans children. Sister can talk the leg off an iron pot, and after two weeks in solitude this was something of a shock. However, I’m relieved that she’s back as now I have someone to cook for and will eat properly again.

I was devastated to find the puppy greatly changed: he’d had all his beautiful fur cut off because it was matted with dreadlocks. His pelt was pretty much the reason why I loved him, because he was like a big, soft Persian cat that bit my ankles and escaped with pieces of underwear from my room. Proving that I am not a fickle creature, however, and compensating for fewer cuddles, I have made him my running partner. I used to run with our kelpie when we moved into town and she couldn’t chase sheep or rabbits anymore and went a bit bonkers, and I realised how much I’d missed running with a dog. I said to Sister that I didn’t know what I’d do when the puppy’s fur grew back; I’d look like an idiot running with a fluffy cocker spaniel instead of the lean, bare-faced pointer that he currently is. Anyhow, he loves it, and gallops along with his tongue hanging out, still a dumb blonde despite his manly haircut.

Running also has its uses in that AFL season has begun and the boys are training again. This, naturally, necessitates the use of the route past the oval by the fruit bat colony, which allows for the most marvellous vistas, in tandem with the anxiety of being attacked by bats gone mad from the lyssavirus.

Enjoying our child-free freedom, Sister and I went to see Avatar at Hawthorne. Not having had a 3D experience since Expo 88 when we wore cardboard glasses with blue and red cellophane lenses, we were a little unsure how the new versions worked.

‘I can’t see properly. Does yours have a black spot in it?’ I asked Sister.

‘Yes, I took mine off to clean them.’

‘I don’t think the 3D bit can have started yet.’

While we waited for the movie, Sister bailed up the manager and asked why there were no hearing facilities, as I was too tired for a fight. His contention was that, as it was a cinema that showed blockbusters which were incredibly loud, the hearing impaired didn’t need any special equipment to hear. I would have told him that this was a lazy excuse; for most hearing impaired people it isn’t loudness that helps you hear, but clarity.

As it happened, the dialogue was so bad that it didn’t bother me that I missed half of it, although trying to work out what was going on from the context was a bit difficult. I was also irritated that the subtitled translations of the Na’vi language were clichéd. Surely if you go to the effort of creating a new language, you can render its translations a little more subtly than some kind of colonial pidgin?

That aside, I loved the film. I loved that it was so visually gorgeous, that the female characters were capable and graceful, that the interaction between the Na’vi and their surroundings was evocative of Indigenous Australians. I loved the slippage between dream and reality, and that after a while you couldn’t tell which world you were in. It reminded me of Blade Runner (one of my favourite films), where Decker tells the android with whom he falls in love that she isn’t human, as she believes she is, that her memories are constructs, and that the world she’s in isn’t real to her the way it is to him (presuming that he isn’t a android himself, an enduring question).

I also liked the theme of connections – not just between the Na’vi and the natural world but between humans and the Na’vi. The way their hair curled into a plant or animal echoed Case in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, ‘jacking in’ to cyberspace and into another consciousness — which is of course what happened when the humans became avatars, jacking in to another world. The way the Na’vi’s eyes widened when accessing the consciousness of other creatures also made me think of the shock of connection during sex which, in essence, was what the film seemed to be about: the fight to survive, to reproduce, to sustain a way of life.

When the lights came up Sister and I blinked rapidly, our eyes sore. Sister pointed out that the 3D screen was how her world appeared when she didn’t have her driving glasses on. I mumbled a reply, concentrating on getting out the door which is always difficult in darkness with poor balance, and brightened when I saw that the glasses could be recycled.

I was starting work the next day and it was imperative that I sleep. Of course, after my heart pounding for three hours, I didn’t. I could have done with a run to get rid of the adrenalin in my body, or a good laugh.