Ignorance is not bliss…

Posted on April 21, 2008 by borysSNORC

Spent the day sewing with my Mum today. I’ve been so busy going slowly round the twist with back pain and associated psycho-babble nonsense that I didn’t realise how much I missed her while she was away. We sewed, did lunch and chatted. Spent a lot of time talking about my Dad and for the first time in about 4 years I felt like she was ‘back’. She was so very wrapped up in looking after my father that I think a large chunk of her disappeared for a while there and it seems the travel has restored some of her confidence and somehow she’s given herself permission to laugh again.

I told her about Angel’s experiences in his new school and what he’d been learning in art class. And I took the opportunity to express my thanks to her for sending us girls to a good private school though I know it must have been a considerable investment as my father’s income was fairly modest when I was young. She told me that when we were very little kids (around 3 and 4) she had suggested to my father that they needed to start saving for ‘the girs’ education’ and his response was “What for? They’re girls, they’ll go to school until Year 10 then get a little job until they get married.”

Well apparently he couldn’t have said anything worse as Mum herself had been made to abandon her education by her step-mother at barely 14 years of age and sent out to work as a seamstress. So Mum drummed him about the importance of giving us a good education and luckily she won the day and we went to good schools and two of us have completed university degrees to boot. I never knew my Dad was so old fashioned in his thinking as he always seems so proud of his girls. 🙂

Thanks Mum!

Letter from Cindy

Posted on April 11, 2008 by borysSNORC

Cindy Twidale

April 11 at 6:13am

My Darling Robyn,
I have missed you so much. I’ve been catching up with your blog and I am of course very concerned about the effect of the accident. I also haven’t laughed so much in a long time. Your wicked sense of homour, stinging wit….oh… I just plain miss you. You are the only girl I would ever think of jumping the fence for. I wish I was there to try and distract you from the pain and help look after you. I miss our chats and road trips. I know this message is completely selfish and is making me feel homesick as hell but I had to send it.

I love You.

Cindy XXX

PS cause diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

I am so far away

Posted on March 28, 2008 by borysSNORC

Friday

Back on the road – what a glutton for punishment am I!

With Equinom only just having returned from overseas stints in South Korea and a three month stay in Washington doing an internship for Senator Chuck Nagel… she’s now off to Canberra-Babylon like everyone else.

What can I say about my oldest friend. We met in Grade One at the Catholic school that I am now inflicting on my son and my recollections of our meeting and our early years together are quite vivid. We met on the first day of school – lots of nervous Mums biding goodbye to lots of crying children (kids back then never had day care etc and weren’t accustomed to being separated from their parents for any duration) and I had gone up to a girl named Libby Free and asked her if I could be her friend. Libby’s reaction was to grab Michelle Bobberemein’s hand and say ‘No! Michelle’s my friend!’ in a most decisive and final way. And Equinom came to my rescue and said ‘Don’t worry you can be my friend.’

And thus began a friendship that has spanned 30 years so far. And one couldn’t ask for a better friend than Equinom. She never reproaches one for not being in touch, and she may slip off my radar for several weeks at a time only to resurface for Apple and Cinnamon tea and it’s like we’ve been hanging daily all along. We catch each other up on the goings on in our lives and discuss mutul acquaintances, travel, poliitics and who knows what else.

And I can always rely on her for her total and honest opinion – in fact she’s one you’d say is honest to a fault. Once, she came up to me, held my hair back from my face and said “You know Borys, if it weren’t for your pretty hair, you’d be quite ugly” which I took as good advice that I shouldn’t ever consider shaving my head 🙂 We were seven at the time but the advice still remains good. i’ve heard her say to people she’s just met such absurdities as “You know orange really isnt your colour is it?” or other equally blunt observations.

But I love her dearly in spite of her obvious defficiencies in the tact department and will mss her pithy and quick witted quips…. no one grasshoppers like Equinom!

Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!

Posted on March 6, 2008 by borysSNORC

Hmmm… Iced VoVos. I have a packet of Iced VoVos in the cupboard…. and I wanna open ’em, but I know the minute I do, the boys are gonna scoff the entire packet in a day or two… tops. My old boss, Guz used to buy Iced VoVos special for me at work but whenever I opened up a packet, I’d have one biscuit and then when I came into work the next day there’d be a brand new packet on my desk cos the guys would have eaten the entire packet after I left for the day.

Why do guys go for the Iced VoVos?? They’re such a granny sort of biscuit all pink and fluffy… so why do they seem such favourite with the men? I remember once when I was little, my father was home for the day because his work had gone on stike…. and he was pissed off about having to stay home when he had so much work to do and was also pissed off about losing a days wages while the Union made their point. And what exactly were they on strike for? Goliath (the same Goliath telco that I ended up working for last year) used to have tea ladies that came around their offices each day with cups of tea and bikkies for all the guys and it seemed that ‘management’ had recently decided to ditch the tea ladies and their bikkies which mean no more Iced VoVos for the boys. My Dad spent that day thumping around in his bloke cave being pissed off about having to go on “strike over Iced bloody VoVos”.

So now I’d love an Iced VoVo with my cuppa, but if I open ze packet, I pwredict zere vould be nune leff in ze morning!
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Snake oil anyone?

Posted on February 27, 2008 by borysSNORC

There’s something very very wrong with me…. other than the obvious that is. Yesterday then psych at the Pain Clinic had a go at trying to help me with the traffic phobia/PSTD resultant from my recent accident. The technique is called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and from what I understand it is a process/treatment intended to help you reprocess traumatic events into your logical memory somehow and allow you to no longer respond to them emotively or physiologically. Sounded pretty good in theory, but the psych I’ve been seeing had ruled it out for me as she ‘felt that someone of my personality was unlikely to respond to EMDR’… whatever that means.

So I spent an hour with the Pain Clinic psych and she had me concentrate on each of my car accidents several times over while having me watch her move her hand rapidly left to right in front of my eyes. Firstly I had to ‘play them through in my mind’ and ‘access the memory’, then again to try recall further details, and again to try to recall and relive the feelings, emotions and even physical sensations of those accidents. Apparently most people experience very distressing reactions to this…. but not me.

I could remember all the accidents perfectly, and recalled tiny details I’d forgotten, but when asked to convey what I felt throughout the process, I was calm, articulate and perfectly rational. I didn’t have any reaction to ‘reliving’ the accidents and certainly no emotional distress or physiological responses. The psych seemed sort of disappointed that I didn’t react like I was supposed to.

During one of the replaying efforts of my second accident, I even caught myself smiling as I remembered that my Dad had arrived before the ambulance and found me laying on the road, badly winded and not in a good way… and I was swearing like a trooper about the complete ineptitude of the prick that had run into us. But my Dad for the first time ever didn’t reprimand his daughter for using foul language – Dad liked his daughters to conduct themselves like dignified young ladies – which caused me to smile a little wryly at the recollection of his being rather more understanding and rather less remonstrative than normal.

Judging by the psych’s reaction – that isn’t supposed to happen. She seems to think that I’ve developed some sort of defensive dis-associative tendency that doesn’t allow me to access the emotions and physical reactions that the accidents should cause. Shrug…. Personally I think that maybe I’m just ordinarily too pragmatic and grounded to be freaking out in her safe little office and am therefore recalling the episodes factually rather than emotionally.

Who knows? Either way it didn’t work… and I’ve still been unable to drive and having issues with traffic.
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