Is It Just Me? (10 page)

I have been stewing over the question: what do women want? For weeks. And I've achieved many things in the lead-up to writing this piece: namely, my house has been cleaned four times, my iPad screen disinfected and polished, two spaghetti sauces have been made from scratch, three bunches of lilies have been trimmed and re-vased, and fourteen loads of little-boy clothes have been neatly folded into piles that rival the sale tables at Seed for neatness and cuteness. I have even invented a brown-rice salad recipe. INVENTED ONE.

All to avoid sitting here, as I do now, and contemplating what it is exactly that women want. I don't want to disappoint anyone here – but, hell, I know many of you will be shocked to realise that this fairly ordinary advertising copywriter turned radio announcer turned TV host, who is currently also a gestating mother of two, does not have the answer.

So stumped was I that I did what any self-respecting researcher would do. I put it out there on Twitter. Now, Roy Morgan I ain't, but the answers I received from other women had a common theme. Grab your highlighter because I'm about to share my findings. And you're not going to want to miss a thing.

In no particular order, what women want is: chocolate and Ryan Gosling. And shoes. And to be able to do a wee without a toddler watching. One woman has a seemingly simple request: for the
Offspring
actor who plays Dr Patrick, Matt Le Nevez, to hunt a bear and then write her a poem about how sad it made him. That can't be too hard, can it? They study bear poetry at NIDA, don't they?

So actors, Mars Bars and bears. Oh my! And here we were thinking this was a complex question that somehow involved equal rights, respect and the frustratingly popular notion of “having it all”. How wrong we were!

Is there anything really wrong in believing that a heady combo of confectionery and brooding actors (and bears) is the key to happiness? Does the answer even have to be so cerebral? Most of the women who responded to my question said they actually couldn't possibly answer it. “Too hard,” they said. “Changes every day,” they said. “When you figure it out, let me know,” they said.

A few men even had a crack. Mostly they were of the “who-the-bloody-hell-knows” opinion, but I did have a perplexing exchange with one guy called Jaxzen.

Me: “SO Twitter! What do women want?”

Jaxzen: “It kinda depends on what it is that they want.”

Me: “Umm … yep. That's the question. But thanks for playing, Jaxzen.”

Then the real responses came flooding in. Words like “respect” and “love” were pretty popular. “Appreciation” was also big. The more I read, the more I realised that there can never possibly be only one answer.

One woman said what women want is security: not material things, just to be secure in the knowledge that the people in their lives will be there for them.

I liked that.

And these: to be loved and respected.

To do something that matters to someone. To give back and help. And to occasionally be surprised. The crazy lady within me also identified with this: women want both love and space at the same time and a number of other contradictions that make no sense to anyone else but them.

Is anyone confused? And you thought Jaxzen was a worry.

I was lost in a Twittersphere of Louboutins and lollies, kilojoule-free cakes and Christian Grey when I realised there is actually one answer: happiness. That's the goal … What makes women happy is so utterly subjective, but the goal is the same. And surprisingly simple. Women want happiness. But how we all achieve that is up to us.

For some, being able to gorge on chocolate cake and never put on weight will bring the holy grail of happiness. For others, it's all about justice at work and home. Each to their own. Scott on Twitter thinks the answer is “Chicken Dance”. Whatever that means.

You know what I want?

I want to be able to have fun wherever I am.

I want to be able to cook with beautiful ingredients always.

I want to laugh. All. The. Time.

I want to have one holiday every year with my family where we have no plans and nowhere else to be.

I want to watch less television and read more books.

I want to be able to whinge about never being able to be alone any more, then, after someone organises a hotel room voucher for me, I want to spend the evening eating chips (that I don't like) from a cylinder and missing my children to the point of tears.

I know that last one doesn't make a huge amount of sense, but I just got the devil in me there … and I blame Jaxzen.

 

18th November 2012

So we are on the move. We sold our house a few months ago, have bought a new one and the removalists have slotted us into their schedules. That sentence rolled off my fingers and onto the keyboard in such an easy fashion it could almost be assumed that the last four months have not been an unmitigated hell. Oh, they have! But they are behind us and we're on our way.

We had most of our life in storage already, but the bits and pieces still in our house had to be moved by someone (that is, me) and frankly I was overwhelmed by the task. The smallest things filled me with anxiety. For example, peering into the fruit bowl, I noticed the contents were: one wizened lime, three bread tags, a toy, twenty-five cents in change, a tube of cold-sore cream, a pacifier (out of action for a year) and two sachets of artificial sweetener.

Not so different from what you'd find in any house, I'm sure. BUT HOW DO YOU PACK THESE THINGS? It made me almost nauseous to realise I had to touch all this … stuff. All of it. Every piece. I had to touch it and wrap it in something and put it in a box and classify it in some way with a texta word and then move on and touch some more … stuff. And repeat this exercise until there was no more stuff in the house. Coffee was needed.

Instead, I hatched a plan: I'd go on a throwing-out frenzy. And, given it was garbage night and I had the room to spare in the wheelie bin AND my baby was snoozing, I decided to tackle the pantry first.

Bottom shelf was cans. I gave them a cursory glance and threw out the evaporated milk. I did this because I have recently become friends with some really Italian Italians. They're the real deal. And I'm sorry, but YOU tell them I've toyed with the idea of using evaporated milk in my once-a-year carbonara to save seven grams of fat. And while you're at it, make room in your bed for a horse's head. So tinned milk = gone.

On to the other four shelves, which had been a hotchpotch of categories for the past year or so. It drove my partner mad, but I just couldn't keep any order in there. Even after buying a label writer and 4000 containers with lids, it still looked like something from the TV show
Hoarders
. The first thing I saw were packets of unopened gluten-free crackers and I started to smile. I never expected it but what started as a massive cull ended as a nice walk down memory lane. The gluten-free stage!

Into the green garbage bag went gluten-free crackers, weird yellow penne and a bag of self-raising flour/concrete. I clearly remember buying all that stuff (and more) after reading an article about wheat being evil and making us all fat. Seems the key to staying thin was stocking up on gluten-free food. Because it was inedible. And if you couldn't actually eat your dinner, chances were you were going to come in under your daily kilojoule limit. But, ah, the memories!

Let's move on to the authentic Asian cooking phase, shall we? Healthy! Flavoursome! Hell, there's no reason a chubby white woman couldn't turn out the same food as a seasoned Asian chef! Tucked away at the back of the pantry, I found a significant stash of products that I had originally had to drive a long way to find. Not only that, I had to buy them from people who didn't understand me nor care for my custom. Here was someone who'd watched a doco on Vietnamese street food and thought she was the next Luke Nguyen.

They were right, too. After spending $75 on exotic ingredients, I took sixteen hours to create two bowls of pho. Still smarting, I scowled the next week when I saw someone happily exiting a shop swinging a takeaway bag FULL OF BUCKETS OF PHO for $8. So I opened that garbage bag for the leftover star anise, rock sugar, cassia bark and little squares of muslin. From now on I'd get my pho in a bowl made by someone who had a clue.

Added to that bag were two unopened packets of fried shallots, some Chinese chilli oil (like applying a salve of battery acid and bee venom to my tongue) and a half-used bottle of shao hsing wine (a must-have if you were to recreate
MasterChef
Alvin's drunken chicken – don't pretend you didn't try it, too).

My favourite thing I found was a hexagonal jar of pureed chestnuts and a matching bag of chestnut flour. I decided, as you do, that a chestnut layer cake would be my “thing”. And I did make it. Twice. It took four hours each time, and it was unbelievably delicious. The ingredients were so special I could only buy them online direct from the farm that grew the chestnuts. The effort!

Really, this cake was the equivalent of an IVF baby. It was planned. It was wanted. There'd be no mistakes with a chestnut layer cake. And as I took stock of my life – busy busy busy now and busy busy busy on the horizon – I thought, “I'm never going to have the time to spend four hours on a chestnut layer cake ever again.”

I couldn't bring myself to bin the pureed chestnut, so I put it back in the pantry. It's now my “aspirational pureed chestnut”. I know that when that jar is gone, I will have found either some sanity … or a single friend with the time to make me that chestnut layer cake.

 

25th November 2012

Ah, Christmas! There are less than twenty-three days to go and I'm getting a bit excited. I've not done any shopping, nor do I have any actual ideas, but I'm pumped. I actually feel like a seasoned veteran now … and I will use the experiences I've gained over the past thirty-nine years to make sure that every Christmas from now on is memorable, if not lovely.

We all learn from our mistakes, and when it comes to Christmas, thankfully, we learn from the mistakes of others, too. Sometimes you have to experience those Yuletide lowlights to really make sure you don't repeat them.

For example, the orange and onion salad that appeared front and centre on the trestle table at my great-aunt's Christmas do was the great culinary disaster of 1988. Admittedly, this dish was not made by anyone related to me, by blood or otherwise, and I take some solace in that. An interloper brought it, probably after a conversation that went like this:

Great-aunt: “So we'll see you on Christmas Day then?”

Salad maker: “Yes! What can I bring?”

Great-aunt: “Nothing, we have it all sorted.”

Salad maker: “No, really, I know just the thing! I have a salad that will confuse and amaze everyone and leave everyone talking about it until I am long dead! It's inedible and spectacular! See you on the day!”

The setting was a hot Queensland summer and the location was the cleared-out garage under my cousin's house on stilts in suburban Brisbane. The usual suspects were there – a bit of ham, a few cold chooks, some potato salad with Miracle Whip and spring onion. And boiled egg, if I remember rightly.

The temperature was approximately 265 degrees. And in the middle of the table, in a cut-glass bowl, was a salad that I'd never seen before and, frankly, have never seen again. Thin slices of orange and matching slices of brown onion were arranged in an alternating pattern. The dressing? Cream.

Just cream. Orange and onion drenched in cream. This happened twenty-four years ago and I am still confused. I just did a Google search for it and there's no record of it ever being made by anyone, anywhere, in the history of the universe.

I would ask my great-aunt's friend to share the recipe with me, but she's probably no longer with us. Perhaps it was a concoction of mango, cheese and mayo that did her in. Anyway, the moral here is to never serve an orange, onion and cream salad. Anywhere. Ever.

My second tip is to buy stupid, outrageous toys for kids and teenagers that they really want. Not underwear. Underwear is a terrible present for kids. I do not remember the year I got three pairs of Bonds cottontails from my gran for Christmas. No wait, strike that – I do remember because it was every year.

Kids don't want undies. They want stuff like a Fuzzy Pumper Barber & Beauty Shop. Now, I do remember that year. I wept like a baby. It was 1978. I had just turned five. It was the best Christmas ever and before you pooh-pooh the idea of commercial gifts that break, let me remind you that I still have the Fuzzy Pumper Barber & Beauty Shop. I played with it about two weeks ago, totally absorbed in making hairdos out of Play-Doh in my very own barber chair. I am thirty-nine. So there!

One year my sister got a Merlin and she cried, too. Remember Merlin? It would beep a tune and you had to replicate the beeps. From memory. Nowadays it's about as fun as getting a gift-wrapped stick, but in 1981 it was high-tech, let me tell you. We didn't see my sister for weeks afterwards. And when she did eventually emerge from her bedroom with three new pimples and a new bad mood, she only spoke like Dexter from
Perfect Match
. Great gift!

And lastly, make sure you've got the right gift for the right person. One year, my ex gave me a bottle of my “favourite” perfume. Which was actually the scent his ex liked.

I didn't say anything, but every time I wore it we would fight about how boring it was that I was a vegetarian obsessed with
Buffy
. Even though I was, at the time, chowing down on a lamb chop. Amazing how evocative a smell can be. I should've said something, but by the time I'd worn it on a few occasions we'd broken up and that was that.

So there it is. My own tips for a top Christmas? Keep the onion away from the fruit salad; a few rubbishy toys never killed anyone; buy gifts for those you like, not those you despise.

Follow those rules and you can't go wrong. Happy Yule!

 

2nd December 2012