Dog days

Three days a week -- Monday, Wednesday and Friday -- rain or shine, wind or hail, I drive the 8 minutes to my sisters' house, pick up her 99 per cent cocker spaniel (1 per cent cute) dog Jordan and walk him to the nearby park, a small park with a fenced play area for children and a large oval where dogs can frolic freely.

I've been carrying out this ritual for about 16 months. It is my self-administered social anxiety therapy. The whole thing, including a short training session when we get back (Jordan is hopeless at training once he gets to the park: too many smells) takes about an hour. Jordan and I hang around the oval, trying not to look needy. When our mutual neediness becomes too evident, I project mine onto him: 'He's cooped up all day -- it's great to get him out' (I am equally cooped up - I work from home and, like Jordan, sometimes don't have enough work to do).

But it's true, it's not 'all about me'. Especially at the beginning, I ached for Jordan, stuck in a family who had no idea what to do with him -- 'What's the point of him?' I often felt like asking them. The poor thing, still only a couple of months old and semi-housetrained, was shoved outside to sleep in a kennel pretty much for good after he poohed on the floor.

My two nieces soon tired of playing with him. 'He doesn't bring the ball back', one of them complained. That's true -- you have to train them to do that!

In those first weeks he spent outside, still a tiny baby, when I visited I would unlatch the gate and call and call. No response. Perhaps my sister had taken him somewhere? And then I would find him in the backyard, curled up on an old canvas deck chair he'd adopted, his chin on his paws, lost in a haze of loneliness and abandonment -- 'clinically depressed' would not have been inaccurate. This would send me into my own fog of sadness and I'd spend the rest of the day worrying about him.

Jordan does spend some time inside at night now (I am assured) but even when my sister's at home during the day he mainly sits in the front yard, waiting for someone to walk past and when they do, barking in a fake-angry way and chasing frantically back and forth behind the fence.

Anyhow, Jordan and I need each other, and my sister and I have learned to manage our mutual incomprehension (I am a dog person; she's not. She has a dog; I don't) on the fairly rare times she's home when I pick up my charge.

But it's not all beer and skittles once we get to the park. Sometimes I have to drag myself there even as I drag Jordan, who would happily spend the hour 'reading his pee-mails', as one astute writer called it, on the garden-flanked gravel walkway that leads to the park. Sometimes when we get to the park entrance I'm tempted to do a sharp right-turn away from it and just keep marching.

But the fact is, Jordan and the other dogs are my cover, my id running free and getting away with it, the best distraction in the world. I don't have to look at the people I'm speaking to for extended periods; I look at their dogs. Conversation is simple: what breed of dog is that? Yes, I can see the kelpie/poodle/labrador strain. What's its name? How old? It's got a lovely coat/smile/personality. And Jordan seems to sense when things are getting a bit strained and often does a runner at strategic moments, dashing to the other end of the park so I have to apologise and try to catch him before he gets onto the road.

It's still not easy and I think now that it never will be. There's always a twinge of panic when I see someone advancing from the other end of the park, their beastie bounding ahead or obediently trotting beside them. Do I know them? Do I know the dog? (Depending on the mood I'm in it's sometimes easier if I don't know them, if I can start from scratch.) Not everyone wants to talk of course; some do walking laps around the oval with their dogs following and scratching in the bushes, and some just walk through the park and keep going.

Sometimes there are lonely days when it's only the two of us on the pale yellow dead grass of the oval, bar a maintenance truck or two. Then Jordan will ignore me in the dizzying world of smells that envelop him until the minute he suddenly comes to, and looks at me as if to say: 'well -- are you going to throw the ball or aren't you?'

And sometimes there are bad days when I walk away cursing myself for something I've said, usually to someone I won't see again for weeks, that seems stupid or inappropriate.

And sometimes there are okay days when we meet a friend and have a chat, and say hello to someone else and their familiar pooch.

And sometimes there are magic days when the trees bow in a gentle wind and dapple the sunlight and a group of us gossip in a circle and the dogs run down the side of the tennis courts like naughty boys, stretch their elegant limbs as they charge around the oval or clutch each other and roll around and around on the grass.

On these days especially I leave with a sense of uplift, but even on boring or bad days I rarely regret going. Many times I leave with a spring in my step and the feeling that I have achieved something, made some small personal progress and given my cheeky little friend a small patch of joy in his dull life.

Photo courtesy of Bigfoto (www.bigfoto.com)

Tweet

Furni-phobia: the fear of buying big-ticket consumer goods

I have just bought a new, LCD, digital, HD (not 'complete' HD -- there aren't enough pixels) flat-screen TV and had it installed by the combined efforts of the nice aerial man and a long-suffering friend of mine who is electronically advantaged. And I feel slightly traumatised.

I knew this feeling was coming and I was prepared. Every time I get a new, expensive-ish bit of furniture, brown- white- or blackgoods, or anything that significantly alters my domestic environment I go through a 'trial period' where I am convinced I have made a huge mistake and I should just go back to frittering away my money on clothes.

I know where and how this started. For many years I just didn't know how to shop. I rarely had enough money to buy new household items so acquired my parents' or friends' cast-off fridges, crappy vacuum cleaners and so on. When I ws forced to buy something new I just went for the bottom-of-the-range model and I rarely shopped around.

Then I started to earn a bit of money and somehow found myself with a luxurious wool underlay and top-of-the-range, down-filled doona that conspired to overheat and dry out my entire body so I'd wake at 3 in the morning feeling like a piece of dehydrated meat and screaming for water (that was 2002 and I still haven't got around to selling that almost unused underlay on eBay).

My next try was a heater and for this adventure I turned into Goldilocks, returning the first heater because it was too cold, the second because it was too powerful, then skulking to another shop to buy a heater that was 'just right'.

So I kind of taught myself to shop. I'd been in a twelve-step program and I used the 'letting go' techniques I'd learnt there along with a new-agey concept of intuition I tried to use in my life. And I did get better at shopping, I really did. But it took ages and much trial and error. To this day, buying anything significant involves months of research, browsing and soul-searching until the heart-wrenching decision is made and I reluctantly hand over my card.

And then guess what happens? I convince myself that in fact, despite my gut feeling reassuring me, I have yet again stuffed up, under-researched, not done enough internet searching, not been to the right shop -- what was possessing me that I didn't go there, what was I thinking?

I shouldn't be too hard on myself. The fact is I'm on a low income now so when shopping for a big-ticket item I'm caught between two competing needs -- I can't afford to buy anything approaching the luxury model, but the bloody thing has to last for years. I guess an easy way of expressing this is that I'm looking for value for money. I'm an expert bargainer, and have perfected the down to earth, look-em-in-the-eye 'what's your best price?' once I've made up my mind.

The familiar adaptation process occurred soon after the new mattress arrived. (Two to three weeks before delivery because of Christmas/New Year? No problem. I could wait. It was going to be a big adjustment.) It looked beautiful, so tall and imposing with its luxurious latex pillowtop ('you have to get a pillowtop', my sister had said, 'it feels like you're sleeping on a cloud').

I had been back to the same chain store again and again, going to different branches so I could pretend I was a new customer and spending ten-minute stretches lying back on the mattress I'd provisionally chosen -- sales assistants advise that you have to lie there for ages before you get any idea of what a mattress feels like, because at first it feels great just to be lying down.

(This was a horrible experience. The recession had just started and there was never anyone else in the stores, even on Saturday mornings. Just acres and acres of inviting beds. Sometimes I walked into stores and went straight to the beds and lay down on one of them and then the sales assistant would sidle up and say something like 'looking for a mattress are you?' and it would all feel way too intimate).

Anyway, after the mattress finally arrived I quickly convinced myself that it had been a huge mistake. For a start it was almost impossible to make my bed. My pillowtop, relatively inexpensive as it was, is so heavy you can't really hold it up to tuck the sheets underneath, except at the corners. And because it is so tall, it obscures the deco Danish bedhead I'd bought for a song on eBay only six or so months before. Then of course I couldn't sleep because the mattress was -- well it was too comfortable! It felt too indulgent, too foreign.

And one morning, after a day of sitting, both on public transport and at a theatre, I woke with my upper back aching, having spent too long on my back in the luxurious hollow that the latex had soon developed. I rushed to the internet to discover the truth, and sure enough, latex pillowtops were notorious for sinking in the middle and creating bad backs! That was it, I was going to return the bed before it ruined my spine beyond all repair. Why, oh why hadn't I gone to Beds for Backs? No wonder no one was in those conventional mattress stores -- they were all at Beds for Backs, looking after their spines!

But still my gut feeling said, don't worry, it's fine. You did make the right choice.

A similar feeling assailed me last night about the new tele after my friend had gone home. He'd adjusted the picture so that the golf no longer looked glittery and I could no longer reassure myself that I had made a terrible mistake and would have to return this piece of crap forthwith or sell it to my sister. So the telly was just too right. The screen was too big, the experience too overwhelming after watching a tiny little toy box with a 'bunny ears' aerial for almost 20 years. This monster would swallow me up and turn me into a televidiot.

And then after watching a rock show I never normally bother with I drifted exhausted to bed, and my mattress, my mattress, well it just felt so comfortable, so comforting -- so -- right.

Tweet

Celebrity meltdowns: Joaquin Phoenix on Letterman

Seeing Joaquin Phoenix's strange performance on David Letterman about a week ago set me thinking about the pathologies that fame can give rise to. Phoenix refused to answer most questions beyond 'yes' and 'no' and appeared bemused, befuddled and deeply uncomfortable (but not exactly disorientated, as has been reported). Letterman was fulsome in his praise for Phoenix's performance in the film Two Lovers but stands condemned for his brutal encouragement of the audience's sometimes contemptuous laughter.

Okay, so Phoenix may be on drugs, or having some kind of nervous collapse, or both. If so, like Britney before him, he is forced to undergo his trials in the public eye -- surely a magnification whose implications we can't begin to guess at? There were a couple of things that this strange interview -- one wonders why it wasn't pulled at the last minute -- made me think about.

Nowadays the famous are likely to be those who lack talent but seek fame, the drug we all scream for -- the tired example of Paris Hilton is perhaps the most obvious. It's easy to forget that many, though not all, actors and actresses are, or were before they got onto the Hollywood treadmill, artists first and stars second. Like successful authors who must relentlessly sit on an endless series of panels at writers festivals to spruik their wares, they may well be shy, retiring or simply highly strung.

The self-confessed depressive Guy Pierce and the short-tempered Russell Crowe spring to mind, while Judy Davis in her heyday was famously perfectionistic. The tragedy of Heath Ledger is still fresh in the public's mind, but even at his most stable he appeared uncomfortable, shy and self-deprecating in interviews. It's now a truism that the legendary Monroe dwelt in a bottomless pit of insecurity. Cate Blanchett is perhaps one of the few stars who is allowed to be an artist first and a celebrity second.

Clinical psychologist and television personality Pamela Connolly, who made the psychological effects of fame the subject of her PhD thesis, believes that the famous become traumatised by an idealised version of themselves, constructed by the media, that they cannot possibly live up to. If this is true, such an effect would surely stir up any pre-existing psychiatric condition or issues arising from a difficult or abusive childhood.

Phoenix's odd appearance on Letterman might seem to bear this out: he's an attractive man, but the shaggy dog look does nothing for him. Was he trying to distance himself from an image that had started to tyrannise him?

Perhaps Phoenix could benefit from a session or two with Connolly. She makes full use of her talents in the television series Shrinkwrap, which aired in Melbourne on the ABC during the summer non-ratings period. Each program featured Connolly carrying out a public version of a psychotherapeutic session on a celebrity or public figure, including Sarah Ferguson, Sharon Osbourne and the stubbornly cheerful Stephen Fry.

I adored this show, largely because it was everything Andrew Denton's now-defunct talk show, Enough Rope, was not. The success of Enough Rope relied on Denton's sharp wit and his willingness to exploit his interviewees to get confessions and cheap emotions out of them.

Connolly of course is no stranger to television, veteran as she is of the comedy shows Not the Nine O'Clock News and Saturday Night Live, but her questioning has different motivations. She is genuinely interested in how people tick and how they came to be how they are but she is also on the side of the frightened child within them, sometimes relentlessly but always patiently so. And she knows that this is good television because when you dig down most people's stories are inherently interesting and exciting of our empathy.

This is why everything about this show seems oddly old-fashioned: the low-key lighting, the lack of an audience or special effects. Sometimes while watching I felt I was in a parallel universe in which the capacities of television were used in the ways its makers might have hoped for (and that the ABC is still legally obliged to do): to inform and educate as well as entertain. I kept thinking about those moody BBC Shakespeare productions.

And what's interesting about this is that it takes a while for the subject to submit to Connolly's digging and for their personal story to take off: you need a modicum of patience to get the most out of it. It's both odd and pleasing that the show has been made possible by the evil twins of trash culture and reality television: the show relies and rides on the assumption that we all want to eat celebrities and would-be celebrities alive, but instead it allows us to see them as vulnerable and needy human beings, just like the rest of us. And it also invites those of us who are not psychoanalytically aware to look at our own 'inner child' with a tolerant and even loving eye.

Tweet

Vein hopes

If this blog is to be honest I have to deal with the issue of body image, which at different times, depending on how I'm 'travelling', dominates my life.

When I take a step back from my body image 'issues', what I find fascinating is how the horror I sometimes feel at some aspect of my body is mobile, choosing different elements to focus on -- suggesting of course that the feeling has less to do with the realities of my body and more to do with my psyche. You would think an awareness of this would help to avoid the sometimes obsessive focus on what's 'wrong' but unfortunately it doesn't work like that.

Ageing is the enemy of those with body image problems. This is because with age the body continues to change and there are always new, heart-sinking discoveries to make as the skin continues to thin, sag, collect 'liver spots' and grow ugly new growths with obscure Latin names and no discernible raison d'etre.

So one week it will be my pointy nose, growing ever-longer as I age, that is ruining my life and I'll be convinced that the only solution is to submit eventually to rhinoplasty. Then for about a day my nose will seem suddenly quite manageable. But a short while later I'll discover with a sickening lurch that the veins on my legs seem to be becoming more visible by the day. And then as I inspect myself it will become horrifyingly clear that the veins are now crisscrossing my entire body, their paths and connections there for the world to see, their blu-ish tinge destroying my fantasy of ever having a body I could happily display to the most casual lover.

The veins are an interesting example because they have become more prominent since I started exercising. This is ironic as I began my exercise regime partly to help manage my body image problems! But when you take part in regular exercise the veins become healthier and larger and if you happen to have increasingly thin skin, as I do, they are even more visible. From the forums I visited on the internet it seems that veins also become more prominent in pregnancy, particularly over the breasts.

The celebrity mags love to focus on the ugly hand veins of middle-aged, mostly female celebrities and in the course of coming to terms with mine I found on the internet numerous close-ups of the tortured, stringy networks on the hands of Madonna, Angelina and Sarah Jessica Parker. If they could put up with veins like that in the interests of good health and nice biceps, perhaps I could put up with my less prominent versions?

In fact, discovering these glaring imperfections on the bodies of those whose career it is to maintain bodily perfection was incredibly therapeutic. I figured that these women could not have helped noticing their veins, perhaps hated them, but were obviously not going to give up exercising.

And there is no way of hiding veins like this -- you can cover them with fake tan but the outlines are still apparent (there is a plastic surgeon in New York who apparently removes hand veins, but what horrific consequences to the venous system might this extreme course of action lead to?) So the likes of Angelina were choosing to live with a conventionally ugly physical attribute fully on display for the merciless cameras of the papparazzi.

And conventionally may be the operative word here. The Elizabethans apparently considered skin with visible blue veins a sign of refinement. I am both literally and figuratively thin-skinned and it's tempting to think there is a link between them, but this seems absurd. Regardless, I'm stuck with having an outlet for my neurotic feelings always handy should I look down at any visible body part.

The trick is to distract oneself as one would a child: 'look over there!' Self-obsession and rumination lead nowhere. The world and its objects can provide a safe landing place for the attention.

Mindfulness helps too, developing an awareness of thought processes without judging them, but without mistaking them for the truth. Mind noting is one useful mindfulness technique, ie saying something like 'thinking about veins' when obsession strikes.

Another technique -- which I dislike because it relies on others' misfortune -- is to compare my body image problems with those who have serious skin problems or disfigurements.

I can't pretend that my prominent veins are a positive thing or that I would not be without them because they have made me humble. I still dream of a thick, firm skin that covers up the constant flow of blood through my body and leaves me less exposed. But for this day only, for this hour, for this minute, I can put up with my veins.

Tweet

Zen and the giants of professional tennis

Tennis is the only sport I can bear to watch. It is is above all else about personality and individual combat. It's about two wills and skill sets pitted against each other in a fight to the metaphoric death. Therefore I'm not one of those tennis lovers who will watch any game with glee, valuing only the skill of the strokes. I have to happen upon a player with a personality that interests me and then I'll watch their every match. This year, in my intermittent televisual consumption of the Australian Open in Melbourne, one of those players was Jelena Dokic.

There is of course this young woman's sad history, the horrific parent and the baggage we sense she must carry. But what I love about Dokic is her dagginess. Regardless of success or the lack of it, some players are unerringly graceful, appearing to move effortlessly even as the sweat makes their soaking wet tops stick to their backs. Others move heavily, awkwardly, and seem to be exhausted by every point. Dokic is one of the latter. Even when approaching victory every one of her points is hard won. That she was defeated before the final was somehow fitting but not a denigration of her talents.

I loved her constant frown, the beratings she served herself after every error and the strange way she would appear to unfocus her eyes, staring emptily at the net, for a few moments before her foe was due to serve. She always refocused in plenty of time and I wondered if this momentary turn-off was some kind of mental break she had learned to give herself.

So what do I take from Dokic's stoicism? During the recent heat wave I found myself thinking of her determined frown and the way she wiped her forehead or blew on her fingers after losing a point. The way she just kept going while obviously at near exhaustion (having got into the Open on a wild card, she was not at peak fitness). I found myself comparing the struggle to keep sane, to keep working in the heat, with her doggedness. And I kept going.

The men's final, between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, was an example of two giant personalities at war, but there were other interesting undercurrents. A defeated Federer had to halt his post-match speech because he broke down and wept, a sad inversion of the tears of joy he shed after his Australian Open victory in 2006. The crowd were with him, reassuring him with their enthusiastic applause, loving him for being an emotionally open man who is able to show his feelings -- off the court rather than on it.

Professional tennis is a celebration of athleticism at its youthful peak, of bodily strength, endurance and skill. But interleaved with this is an autumnal process of diminishing powers that as spectators we have no choice but to observe. Every great player is bound to go downhill sooner or later as youth begins to fade.

Federer's skill is clearly still evident -- he's not number 2 for nothing -- and despite being older than Nadal, in theory he could have won that match if he'd made far fewer mistakes and kept his cool. But the odds were against him -- at 22 Nadal was younger and fitter, his impatient leg tapping before the first game a small indication of his restless energy.

I think the popularity of Andre Agassi in the last years of his professional career was due to his acceptance of the ageing process and the maturity and emotional intelligence he brought to the game. He was so clearly still in it because he loved tennis and his cool, focused demeanour suggested he had done the mental work necessary to give himself longevity. His Zen approach was evident at every lost point -- he simply let it go, even after bad calls, and marched back to the baseline, ready for the next point. He had overcome his ego and was willing to bear the losses as well as enjoy the wins, and he used his diminished capacities to their fullest potential.

Watching tennis for me, then, is a philosophical experience. I rejoice in the possibilities of human talent and striving, and I watch with regret as, again and again, the devoted sloggers are defeated by factors they cannot control, including the limitations of their bodies and psyches. I'm constantly reminded that youth is fleeting, that victory is rare and that we are all slowly fading away.

Of course, those who lose on the court will, perhaps even before they leave professional tennis, find other outlets for their talents, have other kinds of victories and successes, and learn new skills as well as having made pots of money. Their lives as a whole won't be downhill at all: people can keep growing and developing up until the day they die.

But when the sweet bird of youth begins to stop singing and, more prosaically, your supply of growth hormone diminishes, there's an autumnal quality to life that simply can't be denied, and you need to find new strengths to compensate. Watching the tennis in Melbourne each summer helps me come to terms with this.

Tweet