7 Aug 2005

Saturday’s here and we’ve just pulled into the lot of the Catholic school that doubles as the Tai Chi training ground on weekends. I spot a black motorbike propped up beside the front gate. Sweet, I think. Andrew’s here.

(For those of you not so acquainted with the earliest of my rantings, Andrew is one extremely hot occasional Tai Chi instructor who is not only ridiculously good-looking but also like the most graceful and coordinated person I know. Did I mention he drives a motorbike? Not one of those big chunky ginormous oooh, look-at-me, I’m-asserting-my-manhood-and-just-in-case-you’re-wondering-my-package-is-big-as-well vehicles, but subtler, sleeker, yet with enough random silver pipes and dials growing out of it to exude the kind of virile masculinity most often seen in the pages of those trashy guy mags with half naked blondes fawning over hotted-up sports cars. But in a good way, of course. And the black leather biker jacket that goes with it – omigod. On most people a fitted biker jacket does have its strange appeal but on Andrew? Excuse me while I go off to drool. Screw political correctness and not being shallow – I would so go out with a guy with a bike who looks as hot as Andrew does in his biker jacket. Heck, I would buy myself a motorbike purely for the valid chance to own a said sexy jacket… but I digress. Ahem.)

So anyway, for the next hour or so I was completely distracted by the inescapable hotness of Andrew. He’s got this five o’ clock shadow and… well, “bedroom” hair for lack of better word I swear I’m not a creepy obsessive pervert, I just like admiring from afar… okay, MESSY hair that you know isn’t styled but looks better than if it was, and he’s wearing this big pair of sunnies that can look totally sleazy on the wrong person but he manages to pull them off the way the lead singer of Stereophonics did at the Live8 concert who by the way is also very rock star hot. And then at one point he put my hands on his chest (I swear it’s not as bad as that sounds! Oh really, you perverted people) …to demonstrate how one of the moves can be used to knock someone over – oh lordy.

Tai Chi class has suddenly become a hell of a lot more interesting.

Posted By Little Miss Nobody//7:54 pm

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4 Aug 2005

It's so hard to say goodbye... 

Come Friday night and a silver behemoth of a four-wheel drive arrives on our doorstep. DD is having so much fun playing with his precious new toy, fiddling with the air-con and the power windows and the steering-wheel volume control of the CD player – though I admit I’m not averse to a bit fussing myself. And what a precious new toy it is to DD; he instructs me to manually feed the seatbelt back after I’ve taken it off so as not to scratch the interior. He also insists on MD spotting for him when backing out of the garage at night and drives at about 2km an hour through the back lane to stop the perfectly harmless branches from sullying the pristine top coat of paint. He’s always complaining how as an automatic it doesn’t handle as well as the old car, but you can tell he’s enjoying not being vehicle-bullied by all the other nicer cars on the road.

Yesterday I had my last ride in the old bomb before we sent it off to car shop. As I stared into the grape juice stains in the back of the front passenger seat from the time we drove around Tasmania it struck me for the first time that we were really going to get rid of the car we had had for the last ten years. Most likely it’s a screwed up product of our society’s consumer-driven emphasis on the value of material goods, but I suddenly realised that I had grown a funny sort of sentimental attachment to the old bomb. In a twisted way, the little white sedan had become a part and protagonist of our family history.

In its long-suffering lifetime after it had fallen into our hands, the bomb has trailed along (or rather, carried us) faithfully through all matters of strange events and borne all our peculiar idiosyncrasies with nary a protest. It has become an embodiment of the making-it-good-in-the-big-bad-world psyche of my folks from its baptism of fire of sorts when some random dickhead rammed into its side because he thought we were uninsured to when another random dickhead drove his motorcycle into the front door. All the road trips we’ve had – dodgy Soviet-era choral pieces which was about the only music DD allowed in the car, roadside naps after hours of driving, and when I was younger how MD used to squash up in the back with me to play hangman and snap. DD’s lengthy and tedious demonstrations of how to slowly come to a stop before a set of traffic lights so as not to prematurely kill the brakes. The way every time we went to the market I had to spend the ride home with vegies sharing the backseat and a bag of bananas in my lap because there just wasn’t enough room in the back. Eating ice cream out the door on hot summer days because DD didn’t trust me not to drip all over the interior. Philosophical conversations while going down the freeway at 90k per hour and all four windows completely wound down.

All of the sudden, I didn’t quite mind so much the sitting behind the driver’s seat with my knees up to my chest, or the funny smell in particular places in the back, or the way anything left in there over the weekend went mysteriously missing, or the fact that the windscreen wipers had a blind spot smack bang in the middle of the driver’s line of vision. Sure it was a bomb, but it was a damn good bomb that had miraculously survived ten years of my oddball family and me.

I’m going to miss our little white sedan.

Posted By Little Miss Nobody//2:34 pm

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1 Aug 2005

Quote of the Day 

"Ohmigod, I love that song! It taught me how to spell bananas."



- Heather, on Gwen Stefani's 'Hollaback Girl'

Posted By Little Miss Nobody//8:29 am

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