Tag: dating

Monday Bloody Meditation

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MONDAY meditation and I dash to my den of zen. It’s been a bit of a tawdry week and my mind is as murky as the Brisbane River. A new woman in my class sits too closely to me. “I hope I’m not invading your personal space?” she asks. “No,” I smile, secretly planning to move her mat when she’s not looking. The only thing stopping me is I’m pretty certain it will get me expelled from my meditation class. I know her type: the kind of person where you can have the entire languid stretch of Coolangatta Beach to yourself, and she’ll plop her Disney cartoon characters towel right down next to you. And then she’ll light up a cigarette. For the sake of this tale, let’s call her Space Invader.

We begin our meditation and something strange is happening to me. Instead of feeling universal loving kindness, my body is being overcome by nausea. As our meditation deepens, so does my nausea. I start to panic, I have no idea where the bathrooms are. I doubt I can even make it to the door past the other bodies without being noticed. I consider throwing up in the bowl in which we’ve placed our meditation money. My teacher guides us to our head and asks us to concentrate. My head starts spinning and the room goes a little black. I break my mediation and sit with my head between my legs, panting like a woman in labor. I am hardly the poster girl for enlightenment.

But even more curiously, Space Invader seems to be going through her own unusual experience. Her stomach is bubbling and gurgling like a witch’s cauldron and I’m pretty sure there’s an alien in there trying to escape. In between waves of nausea I have to stifle the urge to burst out laughing. It’s a truly horrendous sound and it won’t stop.

We eventually finish our meditation and our teacher asks for feedback on our experience. Space Invader pipes up: “I don’t know why, and I didn’t feel sick, but I had an overwhelming urge to dash to the door and go outside and throw up.” Now I’m really freaked out. That will teach her for sitting too close to me and my demons. Spacey continues: “I’m currently fighting four wars.” Four wars? Who is this person, Napoleon? I know nothing about her personal battles, but her stomach has declared Jihad on itself.

I tell my teacher about my experience. She thinks I am “making progress”. If wanting to throw up in meditation is progress, I’d hate to see me run a marathon. Spacey, on the other hand, has proven an interesting point. Sometimes we don’t need to leave home to travel. Heck, if her tummy can channel the Taliban by merely meditating, I’d hate to let her loose on the world.

Back at home where I know the way to both the door and the toilet, and I can throw up on my own cash if I’m really desperate, a man who calls himself Aim and Fire sends me an email wishing to make contact. His profile states he wants to be “very, very naughty with each other and make 2012 the Year of Being Naked.”

And Spacey thought she had problems.

Where are all the fellas, Cinderella?

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MY friend Tacky leans over and purrs in his American accent: “We both need to face it, you’re just not hot in the tropics.” We’re in Bali, drinking the lethal Indonesian rum the locals call Arak. I’m complaining to Tacky about the GFC (Global Female Crisis: a lack of men). Tacky is dead right. While I sweat bucket loads up in Singapore, I’m seriously not hot. Not in the dating sense. We both agree I’m a better version of myself south of the Equator, which tends to exclude a fair whack of the world.

 Singaporeans, it must be said, are even less tactful than Tacky. I wear a new red dress to work and stop at my local fruit seller “Ah, Chris, you look good in red lah, but don’t wear black, you look terrible in black.” In the lift, my Asian colleagues launch into a conversation about my weight. “Chris, you lose some weight can?” “Um, no, I haven’t lost any weight,” I reply awkwardly, while 8 sets of eyes fix firmly on my buttocks. “Yes, Chris not so fat, lah?” they discuss among themselves. My British mate Murray has a theory that after 2pm Ang Mohs or “red devils” as the Singaporeans like to call us, start to go off in the heat. Murray should know, he perspires so much he looks like he’s battling malaria every single day. He reckons we smell like vinegar. I come to the stinking realisation he is right. So, not only by Singaporean standards am I fat and poorly dressed, I now also pong. My theory isn’t helped when my boss decides to implement a seating reshuffle and positions me next to a Singaporean colleague. “I don’t want to sit near her,” my colleague announces to the meeting. Everyone, including me laughs. After the meeting she approaches me: “I wasn’t joking. I don’t want to sit near you.” I try to sniff my armpits without being caught.

 To escape the unwanted attention, I meet Tacky for a Balinese holiday. The locals call us Tom & Jerry. He’s Tom. They also think we are married but remain confused as to why we have separate rooms. Around this Indonesian paradise we roam, which I punctuate with intermittent moans: “Where are all the men?” Tacky suspects they are all in Kuta, one spot on the island to which he has refused to accompany me. “If you can’t find a man in Kuta you are seriously not trying hard enough,” he says, before waving me off with a final word of warning: “Just stay out of trouble.”

 I manage to do this for all of one hour. Right up until check-in at my hotel where I discover my booking has been cancelled. I’m a little bit tired, a little bit hot and a little bit ready to go home. I toss my passport onto the counter with a little more enthusiasm than usual. They give me a room key and someone else’s passport back in return. I intend to spend the rest of my days travelling the world as Natascha from Minsk. I’m convinced she has better luck with men than me.

 I wander the beach, witness a fiery beach funeral ceremony, drink icy cold beer and have a head massage. I frolic in the first surf I’ve seen in many, many months and read a “penny dreadful” as my great, great grandmother used to call romance novels. I have one afternoon to live it up before I return to Singapore. I feel like an escaped prisoner on the lamb. I linger over some lychee martinis before wandering down to the main drag of Kuta. It’s loud and lively and before long I’m dancing in a Reggae bar where brash Balinese “rent boys” rub their bodies against me. It dawns on me that I have become one of those sad women who dance to Bob Marley while attracting young male prostitutes in foreign bars. All I need now is a floral kaftan and a bad sunburn. Tacky’s words linger in my ears. “Don’t get into trouble.” I walk home alone and am offered sex and drugs, both of which I politely refuse to the dodgy dude on the motorbike in the dark back alley in which I find myself. I run all the way back to my hotel room and lock the doors. I picture waking up with a dead body beside me, half a dozen Indonesian police standing by my bed, and no plausible explanation for what has happened.

 I fly back into Singapore. I’m in search of its soul but so far, all I can find is sweat. On a bright note, I never need to shop for vinegar again.

 

 

The Goddess has arrived

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IT’S 5am at Queen Alia Airport in Amman, Jordan, shortly after the Muslim call to prayer. And all I’m feeling is the call to Muslim man. I’ve travelled some 25-plus hours from Brisbane, via Bangkok to the Middle East and have landed with hair that resembles a sucked mango and a mouth which feels like a colony of bats are seeking asylum inside my throat.  But I can’t resist. The Arabs, both male and female, are so handsome, it’s like I’ve arrived in a parallel universe. I attempt to say hello “Salam wa aleikum” but all that comes out of my mouth is a strangled sound, and a little bit of spit. Fuelled by sleepless delirium and excitement at being back in the Middle East after nearly two decades, I ask our guide to translate to the Immigration Officer the question of whether he would like a wife. “Wait one year” comes the reply. I’m so jetlagged, I’m unsure whether I should simply stand to the side of his counter for the next 365 days or actually come back after I’ve done a few more things with my life. My travelling party rolls its collective eyes:  it’s classic Goddess.

Let me be clear: a Goddess, I am not. I’m not even Bridget Jones, more like her daggy underpants themselves. I inherited this nickname last year when I was working in Singapore, sweating out my body weight each day along the Equator, while living in Little India. The Indians there seemed to adopt a curious attraction to me, so the name arrived and stuck, as nicknames tend to do. The Global bit comes from the fact I’m a travel writer, who seems to uncanningly find herself hunting for a husband while simultaneously foraging for a story. Let’s just say, I always come home with a story.

I’ve told my friends I’m “on assignment” in the Middle East. Heck, I’ve even packed my khaki pants, just in case some mystery editor calls me up to jump over the border and cover the strife in Syria. The fact the only shoes I’ve packed are thongs shows how serious I am taking the idea of being a war correspondent. And thus instead, my travelling party and I head to the Dead Sea.

Across the salty water sits Israel. Jericho to be precise. If I squint into the sunshine, my 41 year old self dissolves and I can picture my 25 year old backpacker self, with the boyfriend who would become my husband and then my heartbreak. The image is like a mirage. But sad, I am not. Resilient, foolhardy, passionate…yes. And ready to take on the world again.

I wake up each day to find three waiters battling over who will bring me my morning coffee. I end up drinking three different cups of coffee to appease all three. I suspect I shall miss this when I wake up next week in Brisbane. The next day, my guide informs me: “Tomorrow night you will see a man dance in the desert.” “A man!” I practically shout, “and what does this man do?” I ask, barely able to contain myself, expecting something erotic and exotic in equal measure. “Not a man,” comes the reply “Amman dance.” The dance is pretty good for something non-erotic. The Arabs possess charm in spades. It continues when I go to buy batteries for my camera. “Your lips are like honey,” the dapper shopkeeper says, “I can see Sydney in your eyes.” I don’t have the heart to tell him Sydney is 1000km from Brisbane, so I would have to be Wonder Woman and not just an ordinary Global Goddess, to be able to possess this special trait.

We continue on to Petra, the desert of Wadi Rum, the Red Sea and then home. I’m right, there are no handsome Arabs making my morning cup of Joe when I wake up in Brisbane. But a bloke who calls himself Ford Falcon has contacted me and wants a date…