May You Live in Interesting Times

They say that in Asia, ‘may you live in interesting times’ is a curse.

Let’s digress for just a minute.
Who are ‘they’?
Am I ‘they’?
Seems that I’m the only one doing any bloody talking around here at the moment.
And, let’s face it, no one gets any chance to break into the conversation unless I choke on a pretzel.

And is it like newspapers and libel?
In newspapers, if you publish untrue information, you are equally responsible for repeating the untruth as if you had made it up yourself.
So, by quoting ‘them’…do I become ‘them’?

Ok, start again…
I’ve recently come slap up against the curse ‘may you live in interesting times’.
(I nearly said “discovered the curse…” and then I thought about the whole European colonial myth of discovery of continents which had obviously been inhabited for millennia and ‘lost tribes’ which actually knew their way around the place quite well and…see, ‘they’ really don’t get a word in edgewise around me’.

So…may you live in interesting times!
I always have, you know.
I’ve got an interesting job, got an interesting outlook on life, got some interesting friends.
(Anyone uninteresting quickly becomes uninterested in being my friend for some reason – might be all that talking over the top of…well…’them’. So that’s whose making up all these bloody sayings.)

But it can be a curse.
I’m not highly cursed mind you – sort of an intermediate level II curse I’m thinking.
Probably because I’m not highly interesting – again, just intermediate interesting, and maybe mostly because I hear and repeat a lot of what ‘they’ are saying.
When it comes to interesting curses, I’m definitely not up there with the tomb of King Tut or the Hope Diamond, but my curse is occasionally personally distracting nonetheless.

Like now.
I’m sitting back in my Home Town, back at my old job (and my old working hours – hence the midnight time-frame) after, apparently, being irreplaceable.
You’d think that would be a compliment.
But ‘irreplaceable’ in real terms means ‘you’re never going anywhere else ever, ever again’.
Or ‘no other bugger would work this hard for this pay so we’re stuck with you’.

I tried, you know I really tried.
We bought property.
We planted corn (which is doing very nicely, thankyou, even if it is mostly a camping area for earwigs with a convenient corn-husk shadecover).
I have chooks – which will have to go now.
And a dog – which will have to stay, of course.
And now the world, and all my plans, are upside-down again and I’m back in the fast-paced and distinctly-glamorous world of small-town journalism with its vicious business feuds (how dare they sell hot spuds at their café when we bought our ‘you-beaut’ hot spud oven LAST year!), its exciting sporting developments (who will be chairman of the regional football league and why is the local pub sponsoring the basketball team instead of netball team this year?) and its deep-seated community grudges (how dare they travel 32 minutes to dump their garbage in our free landfill rather than pay the $2.50 their own council charges, clogging up our services, people are so inconsiderate and we don’t pay our fees for this, I can tell you!).

Oh, and I left out all the ‘lovely afternoons that were had by all’ thanks to Moira, Verna, Greta, Lola, Beverley (insert appropriate name here) and the sponge cake she baked for Ladies Bowls on Wednesday afternoon.
You know, it’s not a ‘lovely afternoon’ at all if I have to spend it taking all the capital letters out of the golf report (nearest-to-the-pin is NOT a proper noun) and correct all the teachers’ spelling in the school report (it’s not just 16-year-olds who have a literacy level of 11).

But, strangely, I DO love it.
And what I do IS important, people stop me on the street to tell me so.
And how many people out there REALLY have a job they can say they love and people love them for?
(Hookers, by definition, maybe – all that ‘loving’ I mean. But luckily, in my job you only have to report about social diseases, not check for them intimately before you get down to business, so to speak.)

But back to my rant…
And you know, they made it easy for me to move back.
The ONLY property for rent in a town of 4500 people was being leased out by my employers.
The Man’s old job is even back on the bulletin boards – it’s like they just kept his seat warm for him.
And considering that someone was killed the first day he started at his new job, that might have been a divine warning that he was better off where he came from.
Turns out he took a $25,000 pay cut to be a little closer to The Farm and a lot closer to long-term lead poisoning.
At first we were impressed by his new employer’s policy of unlimited sick leave.
But then we questioned the need for that kind of policy.
Turns out, when your lead levels hit an ‘inappropriately-high level’ then you’re sent home until they just don’t anymore.
And the guy who got killed on his first day?
Turns out that’s the job The Man was being groomed for.
As it turned out, the position came up a little bit faster than we expected.

So, again, I’m living in interesting times.

Interesting times because I have to convince The Kids that their old friends and their old school are going to be much better than the ones they’ve just spent six months fitting into.
Interesting times because my two-bedroom unit has no backyard and I have a dog roughly the size of an ironing board with the disposition of a rubber superball and the escapist abilities of Houdini.
Interesting times because I’d only just got used to watching Sex and the City repeats four times a day on Austar from my couch in my knickers and a t-shirt and now I’m back at my 28-hours-a-day, smile-you’re-under-constant-‘gossip-nazi’-surveillance job. (To be honest, the whole Sex and the City couch-sloth thing might have been a downside, but I was too comatose to notice at the time)
Interesting because I finally triumphed over the six-legged marauders in my garden long enough to see my efforts fruit, blossom…whatever…literally, and the fucking earwigs are just going to sit down and have a great big picnic in the middle of my organic, non-hybridised tomatos and basil and corn and comfrey and snowpeas and blah, blah, blah. I’m considering ripping it all up and giving the chooks one last humongous meal out of spite.

May you live in interesting times?
I do.
And if you do…well, I’ll meet you there.