FIVE FOR FRIDAY: 10 September

It's Friday, and en route to grabbing my laptop from upstairs, I just discovered one of my cats sitting outside on the balcony waiting patiently for the cat flap to open for him.

He knows how to use the cat flap, but he forgets on an alarmingly regular basis (I'm not sure what goes on in his lovely little cat brain).

So, he just sits there, staring pitifully through the rectangle of transparent rubber until someone, or the other cat, rescues him.

Jokes aside, I can't help but wonder whether there's an apt analogy lurking here: perhaps we all have our own impenetrable cat flaps, an illusory aperture keeping us inexplicably stuck. Life lately has felt like an endless looking through, a sense of being separated from where I need to go by a filmy barrier, knowing I simply need to push against it and find my way into the room — but it's a lesson I must learn over and over.

I confessed to a colleague earlier today: 'My idea of heaven is never having to advocate for myself ever again.'

Everyone I speak to at the moment — no matter where they are or what else is going on — seems similarly ragged and discouraged. Is 2021 wearing you out?

If so, please accept a hug through the ether.

And here are some things I've been enjoying lately.

One. If you've been toying with the idea of 'embracing your greys', as the saying goes, this photo essay from the New Yorker about the 'unexpected beauty of COVID hair' might just be the nudge you need. I also enjoyed this piece about the 'rise of therapy speak', which revisits some of the themes Frank Furedi wrote about in Therapy Culture more than a decade ago. 'We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles,' Katy Waldman writes. 'We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We project and decathect; we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word; we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively.'

Two. I recently rewatched the first two seasons of The Secret Life of Us on Netflix. The series aired in my final year of high school (2001), so feelings of nostalgia ran high, and this article by Deirdre Fidge perfectly captured some of the pleasures and discomforts associated with 'a vision of young adulthood that not only didn’t exist for me, but might not exist at all'.

Three. How do you find new songs? I don't listen to the radio anymore, so I rely on recommendations from friends or the occasional tune Shazam-ed while I wait in line at a café. I have no idea where I heard 'Hesitate' by Golden Vessel & Emerson Leif, but I can't stop playing it. Apple Music. YouTube. Spotify.

Four. Having failed at making traditional cacio e pepe on numerous occasions, I decided to try a vegan recipe instead. Perfect for lazy Friday nights, this cashew cheese makes an excellent sauce for twisty pasta. I scoop some into a saucepan of cooked rotini with a splash of olive oil, some extra salt, and a generous dusting of freshly cracked pepper. (If you've also tried and failed in your cacio e pepe attempts, this episode of 'Botched by Babish' might help you feel better.)

Five. It's been ages since I've last read a novel, but a friend game me a copy of Emily Maguire's Love Objects for my birthday, and I finally got around to reading it. At first, I struggled with some of the content (one of the protagonists is a pathological hoarder, and it hit a little close to home, quite literally — I come from a family of hoarders), and the idiomatic stream-of-consciousness style requires some close concentration. But by halfway through, I couldn't put the book down.

Love Objects starts with a fall: 40-something-year-old Nicole tumbles from a dresser in her cluttered bedroom, discovered several days later by her worried niece, Lena. When a hospital-based social worker asks Lena to ensure her auntie's house is safely tidied for her return, she and her brother, Will, embark on a cleaning spree that risks undoing their close relationship. But each character is dealing with circumstances that undermine their sense of autonomy and control — circumstances that lay bare some of the complexities of class relations in Australia and the fine line we must often tread between empowerment and exposure.

I enjoyed the tenderness and authenticity of this novel, and I'm even considering lending it to my father. You can find out more about Emily's research and writing process here.

(It's just as fascinating as the novel itself.)

What have you been enjoying lately?

Ode to: the curious comfort of cats

The author Garrison Keillor is rumoured to have said that ‘cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose’.

But on the loneliest nights, I reach past my knees to feel for the familiar curve of a spine, the fossil shapes of vertebrae beneath fur.

The cats like to sleep at our feet, suckers for the warmth on long winter nights.

Sometimes I wake from a nap to discover one of them curled nearby — pure coincidence, of course, that they happen to be in the same room as me at the same time yet again.

I read somewhere once it’s a sign of trust and affection when a cat looks you in the eye and pauses to blink. In the feline world, closing your eyes in the presence of another is the supreme gesture of confidence and vulnerability. I try to return their gaze steadily, play it cool, but there are days when it’s all I can do to resist burying my face in the whorls of the ginger cat’s belly, brush my lips across his sweet little head, run my fingers along the length of his plume-like tail.

The other one nests, perpetually grumpy, in our clean washing, knows the evening ritual of rooibos tea: the click of the kettle on our kitchen counter, the reassuring chink of the red ceramic cups, the inevitable splash of lactose-free milk in his dish.

‘I don’t like your manners,’ I scold, when the campaign for an early dinner escalates to his most frenzied repertoire of meows.

Deep down, though, I don’t mind.

To be chosen by a cat is one of life’s smallest but sweetest triumphs, I believe. ‘Dogs are too good and unselfish,’ Anne explains in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island. ‘They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.’

And so we must endure and forgive the occasional patch of vomit on carpet, the errant strands of fur that fuzz an otherwise immaculate black work blouse.

I think of the French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, frequently ill following her divorce from first husband Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars), who retained the copyright to her early novels and rendered her penniless, depressed, and desperately alone. ‘Our perfect companions,’ she insisted, ‘never have fewer than four feet.’

Charles Bukowski — having endured an adolescence marred by physical abuse from his father and the cruelty of Baltimore school kids who ridiculed his thick German accent and teenage acne — commented that ‘when I am feeling low, all I have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns’.

Perhaps this is the meaning of life, I wonder frequently these days. A nose briefly touches my tear-stained cheek.

I get out of bed to top up the biscuit bowl.

An ode to red lipstick

In a recent Zoom meeting with some colleagues from another state, one of them switched on her camera to reveal a stripe of freshly applied red lipstick.

‘Don’t you look lovely!’ we all exclaimed.

Limited to a 5km radius from home and with kids unable to attend school, she must have felt so tired and overwhelmed. But her vivid smile against a backdrop of bookshelves added some unexpected glamour and cheer to our mid-week conference call.

A week or so later, inspired by this small act of cosmetic revelry, I decided to apply a liquid lipstick on a day when I had a series of online meetings scheduled.

‘You look pretty today, Amber. What’s going on?’ one of my workmates joked during our morning check-in; another colleague commented on how nice I looked later in the day.

And I felt good.

I felt good for a moment.

But then I felt silly.

Like many of the seemingly personal choices a woman can make, the choice to wear makeup — or not — is a curiously fraught one.

On the one hand, we’re implicitly expected to present ourselves in a manner that fetishises youthfulness, appeals to men, and says we ‘care’ about our appearances in certain codified ways — including the size and shape of our bodies, the clothing we wear, and the ways in which we groom our hair and faces.

On the other hand, however, women who seem to genuinely enjoy fashion and derive pleasure from 'girly' avocations such as painting their nails or mastering winged eyeliner are often dismissed as frivolous, vain, and less intelligent.

At worst, women who indulge in these feminine, or feminised, pursuits are not only derided by men but also antagonised by other women for undermining the principles of whatever-wave feminism and 'betraying the sisterhood'.

A particularly pernicious strain of these no-win expectations is, I believe, to look good but not as if you tried.

No matter how much thought, labour, and money we might invest in curating our appearance to please/appease the most people, we must, at all times, make it appear effortless — somehow only incidental.

To try is to have failed.

Radical feminist writer Julie Bindel rightly observes that as women we are ‘pummelled with the message that we are not good enough as we are’, and she argues that refusing to wear makeup might represent a more revolutionary act, even now, than burning your bra did in the 1960s.

But perhaps the most revolutionary act we can perform in 2020 is to choose as mindfully as possible, to carefully interrogate these choices and to ask ourselves regularly whether they are grounded in fear or in joy, whether they are motivated by a sense of deficit or delight.

Although I lack the skills to apply makeup in a more sophisctiated way, I still find that scribbling on my favourite eyeshadow stick (a discontinued Nyx product, for those of you playing at home) or wearing some bold earrings are simple ways to subtly but effectively lift my mood, when I think or care to try it.

It's not about the way it looks per se; it's about how it feels.

Catching sight of a sharply defined cupid's bow or feeling the cool metallic kiss of a hoop against my jawline are moments just for me, little pockets of colour, sound and sensation I can experience as part of my self.

As Caitlin Moran has suggested, 'When a woman says, "I have nothing to wear!", what she really means is, "There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today."'

In this sense, something like a slick of red lipstick can be less about aesthetics and more about a very real and present need for identity expression, a way to achieve visibility and agency in daily lives — as much for ourselves as anyone else.

(For the record, the Stila 'Stay All Day' liquid lipsticks really do stay on for ages.)

ODE TO RED LIPSTICK

by Megan Falley (from Rattle #59, Spring 2018)

Cleopatra crushed beetles

to make red lipstick

because even in 30 BC

she knew speaking 12 languages

would be even more impressive

when the words jumped

through a ring of fire.

Circus mouth.

    Ruby Woo. I smile and split

            The Red     Sea.

In medieval times, religious groups

condemned makeup for challenging god

and his workmanship,

but I and any good femme know—

    God invented lipstick.

In post-war New York, butches could get locked up

if they weren’t wearing three pieces of traditional

women’s clothes. Lipstick, stashed in a pinstripe suit pocket,

swiped on quick when someone threw their voice across the bar

to warn that the cops were barging the door,

could keep a queer from being a casualty

for the night.

And when Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

was liberated, each pair of lips as pale as the next,

along with the British Red Cross arrived a shipment

of lipstick. No one was quite sure

who asked for it—seemed petty—what

could a tube of maroon do for women

whose hair,       whose babies,       were ripped from their bodies?

Who could pick up a shard of a war’s mirror

for long enough     to apply a    smile?

How could lipstick be necessary

when there’d been experiments on children? Twins

sewn together at the back? When the nail scratches

in the gas chambers made their way 

through stone?

Five hundred a day, still dying.

Even when liberated, the prisoners could not be looked at

as individuals. Some of them would still die

as numbers.

One lieutenant said he believed nothing

did more for the survivors than that lipstick.

Women, thin as smoke, naked e v e r y w h e r e

except for their mouths:

Red, like they might one day

     flirt    again,    arm

on a jukebox,

    single finger

 running

    down

    a tie.

The next time it’s deemed frivolous,

something left on a napkin

or absent cheek,

remember

    red lipstick,

  in its tube,

    like a bullet,

  but in reverse,

    giving life

         back.