Back in Black

Well, good evening everybody. It seems to be a bit of a public consensus (with ‘public’ here meaning my mum and four friends) that poise has been paused for long enough. Although perhaps the alliteration could be paused a little longer. Stop it! Alright, let’s get serious. And when I say ‘serious’ I mean the party I had for my coming home:

There’s nothing quite like coming home after a long trip away. It’s an equation, where the awesomeness of coming home is made more intense by varying factors of: how long you were away, how rough your trip was, how good the weather is when you get home, how much you love the people waiting for you at home, how many friends come to your party, and how much you missed the food/beer/wine from home.

So I think you should understand when I say that my party was SERIOUSLY. FUCKING. AWESOME. No, I mean really. Seriously guys come on. It was wonderful. Thank you.

The thing is, that was about four weeks ago, and I’ve actually done a whole lot more great stuff since then. I’ve been to some amazing exhibits at GoMA and QAG – including the closing night of their Matisse exhibition. The Queensland Writer’s Centre have facilitated some amazing discussions/seminars about the industry which I’ve been lucky enough to attend. I’ve seen some incredible movies and the Brisbane French Film Festival is just coming up now! I’ve discovered and re-discovered some way cool Brisbane haunts that I want to talk about and I’m also studying a whole shitload of crazy interesting new things at university that are just poised to explode your brain. I bought some great new Brazilian Walking Lilies and I’ve got a totally fucking killer herb garden that you just need to see – and the basil from which I make a cache of tasty new veggie and vegan recipes. I’ve been to half a dozen book readings organized through Avid Reader (including Alain de Botton’s talk) and I’m part of a new bookclub which I’ve already been to so I simply must tell you about what I’ve been reading. To top it off, there are some amazing live acts coming to Brisbane, and Blonde Venus is having a sale that every lady in the state should try and get to. As ever, I anticipate the rambling will sometimes venture into the critical and hard-hitting stuff that gets us all riled up, and I just got back from an International Women’s Day talk that focused on women in the law - boy oh boy was that girltalk interesting! I’ve also made up some new words that you’ll have to familiarize yourself with if you continue to read this rambling. 

Woooaaahhhhhhhh yes. YES! Life is great, and if I don’t write about it here then it just takes up space in my Moleskines. (Oh oh, the hipster sirens are sounding! - It's about time for the regular bag-of-dicks check-up to make sure I don't need euthanising.) Sorry about that. 

Of course, all of this means that poise won’t really be a “travel blog” anymore – and that’s cool with me. Everything adapts and I’m proud of little poise and I’m confident I can carry her home with me. We’re going to get a little freshened up for you, I’m thinking some new tabs and a bit of a facelift. Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to see the crow’s feet and the laughter lines – hopefully more than ever, actually. Time will do what it does best, which is tell. I think it might also be a little touch-and-go for a while, but touching is great and so is going, so I’m flattered more than ever if you read.

I’ve officially started a tumblr for poise too, because I was tired of sitting on the sidelines of the wonderful internet sensations that sweep through our nets and that tumblr captures much better than blogger can. I bought a new iPhone too, so my twitter is going to get into shape (it’s mainly editorial, in the sense that I re-tweet interesting things other people say instead of posting about what cereal I’m eating and dumb shit like that).  I’ve even done some writing for other people/places on the internet too like The Lit Pub, so overall I feel like coming home has just broadened my horizons.

I suppose this is a lot of promises. It’s like an election campaign where I win depending on how many people subscribe to my RSS feed / bookmark my page / add me to their blog list thing.  Good thing I’m not a sleazy politician, otherwise this place wouldn’t be remotely interesting at all, unless I was Nick Xenophon, who is the coolest dude in Canberra, in which case poise would be way cooler than it even is now. I digress.

Stick around, friends. I love you dearly.