Crossing the streams

Ack it's true there has been a significant amount of slackness in the House of Ova (sudden image, eek sorry) but that's because there has been a significant amount of tension. 

I remember in the eighties, early eighties, when people used to talk about 'biorhythms' and there were three lines representing your health, your...god I don't know, two other Important Things, but these three lines went up and down like waves and it was something about when the three lines met then kachow! 

Either that or I'm thinking of Ghostbusters and how you DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS! 

Deadlines large and small to be met (or not), Stuff to be researched and written, conversations to be had, toddlers to be bathed. This last should have its own post except it's part of the Hellacious Triumvirate of dinner, bath and bed. I whined about just this to Screenwriting Mummy about this the other day and she said...yes I remember that phase, it goes for quite a while. 

Cruel words but then her own toddler boy, previously an utter angel, is entering the shout and hurl phase himself. Great screaming tantrum in the bath can only be a few short weeks away. Surely. At least it's stopped me drinking wine at dinner. There is nothing more horrendous then winding down with a nice glass of crisp white to be almost immediately wound up again by a Screaming Tomato.

It has been a strangely disturbing time these past couple of weeks and I include swine flu and the horrific disappearance of that Air France plane. Maybe strangely disturbing things happen all the time, of course they do, I know they do, but for some reason my wobbly consciousness is stringing them all together. 

So friends and loved ones have dropped their bundle or been under attack at work or had cancer scares and tasks seem difficult and stodgy and I feel fat and unhealthy. 

And some of the writing and research I'm doing, murder scenes and mug shots from Sydney's inglorious past. Baddies, like the guy above. And page after page of broken bodies and bloodstains. It's disturbing and unsettling and slightly haunting. The playwrights' group I'm in (7-ON) is doing a 2 week workshop with the Sydney Theatre Company in a couple of weeks time and the photographs are prompting the writing which will in turn become a show. 

And that's great, that's tops, but the other thing that's happened is that I've won a playwright's prize which will see me doing a two week workshop with Edward Albee here in Sydney and also at some point jetting (!) off to Los Angeles. (!!)

And that's great, that's tops but the two week STC workshop and the two week Edward Albee workshop are THE SAME TWO FUCKING WEEKS. 

And that's a little, you know. Poor.

Anyway, that's how I've felt a bit this past couple of weeks. Ultimately I'm good, I'm happy. I'm lucky. But it's just all this Stuff swirling around that I'm noticing and collating and examining and feeling affected by. Which is not the same as feeling infected.

More like, someone, somewhere, crossed the streams.