On Amounting

At the deli’s front window this morning, I press pause to collect flavour from the fridge. This time I fashion something that resembles a sausage from a sizzle using a long pickle, prosciutto, and shaved pecorino. Satisfied, I return to the desk, click play and my lecturer, Andy, resumes his monologue on null hypothesis significance testing. My attention is everywhere but null hypothesis significance testing. I can hear Em whacking and dragging the broom over the gutter outside. She is frantically trying to empty them before the landlord arrives. It’s her day off but there is a leak in the kitchen that is not insignificant, becoming worse, actually, with every downpour. Heavy rain is forecast for tomorrow and she is adamant it is not her fault. Don’t worry, I say, this time come Sunday you’ll be on the aeroplane.

Driving Em, Jente, my niece and my nephew to the airport, I experience a swell of something towards them that almost hurts. They are a family unit of their own and while I am close to them all, I am very much on the periphery of this unit, an extra puzzle piece that does not quite fit. I pull into the drop off lane at the international terminal and step out to assist with all the miscellaneous bags travelling with two children under four requires. All around us are other people, mostly small families and couples, in their aeroplane clothes about to leave this country. There is that chaotic buzz characteristic of international travel and I realise I have not been in such an environment for a long time. I insist on snapping their photo, hug them all as if I’ll never see them again and climb in the car to return to the municipal. I send The Man a voice message that I am thirty minutes away. Then another one a minute later, demanding we book a holiday today.

For twenty-eight days the deli is mine in its entirety. This is fortuitous as it coincides with some rather large deadlines. Rain continues to fall, and I don’t travel to university. I occupy the front window in a way I never have before. At 9 am each morning, I watch my neighbour the tailor put out his A-frame sign. Every morning he waves and smiles, which is more like a brief scrunching of his face than a grin. Throughout the day people pull up out the front of the deli to drop off or pick up garments from my neighbour the tailor. I like watching people pick up garments best, I like watching the way my neighbour has made the item of clothing feel brand new to them again. He brings the sign in at 5pm sharp each day and sends me another wave and another scrunched face. Sometimes he laughs too or lifts his shoulders as if to say: I cannot believe you have not moved. It does not take long, fifteen minutes maximum, until I step out the back of the deli and hear him belting out his karaoke anthems over the fence. I am fond my neighbour the tailor.

It’s my favourite kind of day to be in the fifty-meter basin, which is to say it is autumn, the sun is low and gold, and the wind is non-existent. The trees over the fence are starting to colour at the tips as if someone has taken a flame to just one end of them. They look marvellous like this, a manifestation of the change of season, of the winter to come. Not all that long ago, I would have stood in the changeroom dripping wet after my swim transcribing this image into my phone. I would have arrived home and opened my notebook to sit with the image, with all the images. It dawns on me that I have been deliberately shutting my eyes to get through all the deadlines and null hypothesis significance testing this degree requires of me. Perhaps this explains the derealisation I’ve been experiencing as of late. I haven’t allowed myself to sit and process the information of my experience.

There is a pile of lab reports waiting for me at the front window this morning. Last night, after my laps, I went to Officeworks and printed them out while drinking a non-alcoholic beer. As I drank from the can and watched the woman handle, separate, and staple the pages, I bunny-eared the moment as a low point in my young life. The relief of the swim has worn off now, so the intrusion of cockroaches in my neck is undeniable. At 3pm they manifest in a tension headache, which I work through by way of an alcoholic beer. The lab report pile reads:

• Handbook of emotions; Subjective Emotional Well-Being.
• Implications of Identity Resolution in Emerging Adulthood for Intimacy, Generativity, and Integrity Across the Adult Lifespan
• Ego Identity Status and Psychological Well-Being Among Turkish Emerging Adults.
• Socio-cultural aspects of identity formation: the relationship between commitment and well-being in student samples from Cameroon and Germany
• Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of well-being.

Work is unremarkable until 1 pm when a low woman on the other end of the line tells me she’ll never amount to anything. I write this in blue biro in my open notebook under the date, Friday the 6th of May: 29-year-old-female, low moods, despondent. I tell her that’s not true. I want to ask her several things like where she is sitting right now; the texture of the table I can hear her pressing the end of a pen against; the food in her belly and what lead her to believe this so matter-of-factly. We don’t get there. We’re not allowed to. Instead, I book her in with a psychologist and try to imagine what I might say if or when I am a psychologist and sitting opposite someone like this woman, being paid to give advice.

On her first evening out of lockdown, Sophie visits the deli for a lasagne I’ve assembled out of a ragout Em left behind. I traipsed all over Melbourne for fresh pasta sheets this afternoon and so, I’m shattered to learn I’ve made the lasagne too wet. It doesn’t have that perky lasagne shape in that it fails to remain in a square when I transfer it to a plate. Sophie doesn’t mind, she insists that it’s better this way. Sophie is un-fussy and flexible. I try and copy this aspect of her when I can, but it doesn’t come naturally, not at all. We sit at the front window with knives and forks and glasses full of red wine that has stained Sophie’s lips purple. Sophie is in a similar boat to myself, which is to say she pivoted from art to environmental science at the same time I pivoted from writing to psychology. In order to fall asleep at night, Sophie will, like me, tell herself that one day these disciplines will meet and flourish into something extra-remarkable. Though for now, we wait.

On Thursday, a banner pops up at the top of my screen informing me my laptop screen time was up 32% last week, averaging 7 hours and 53 minutes a day. I close my laptop immediately, collect my keep-cup and make for my local cafe, which, after two and a half years living above the deli, I’ve only just started frequenting. Apparently, my local cafe was named after the Black-Gold dress illusion that broke the internet in 2017. Over the past two weeks, I have developed an affinity for warm, non-caffeinated drinks made with animal milk alternatives. The cognitive dissonance I experience when ordering a strong, hot, almond, tumeric latte or oat hot chocolate is profound. So profound they will often say “sorry, what?” when I order it quietly so as to not let the people I must wait among hear. This then delivers a different kind of dissonance, as I resent not owning my heart’s desires, which belongs to spicy, slightly sweet, warm nut milks no matter the time of day. Today, waiting for an extra frothy almond chai a short bald man walking a Pugalier in a red jacket approaches me. I gaze over him once, then a second time with all my memory but cannot place our relationship. You’re the girl that sits at the front window, he finally says, smiling. I nod slowly, rolling the sentence around my head. Yes, I say, I am.

On the way home from dinner, the traffic light turns yellow, then red and I decide I will circle back to sit and watch the bagpipers that have conglomerated in the middle of Carlton Gardens. It’s well dark and the grass is just about to become dewy. I sit on my helmet, so my knees are up under my chin, to watch them play. I wonder what you call a plural of bagpipers, a spectacle? There is a heavy full moon behind them and the only two clouds in the sky are the ones the moon is resting on like a large exotic egg in a nest. In between songs, I return a friend’s call. He talks slowly about life and love and plans. He doesn’t have any real ones but often discusses them as if he does. It makes him feel productive, I think. Eventually, I am served a question but realise I have little to offer in the way of news.

A sleeky black and white cat crosses the roof over the road, the one that hangs over the old alcoholic, and I flag the time, 4.27 pm, with a ball-point pen. This is the third time this week I’ve seen this cat cross this tin roof and I am now eager to know if this is happening at the same time of the afternoon and if this cat might be on some sort of schedule. In doing so, I am reminded of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris in which Perec occupied a front window for three days and recorded every mundane detail that crossed his field of vision. The product of this experiment was a melancholic, kind of eerie, but profoundly touching piece of psychogeography. Perec belonged to an erotic movement of 1960s France known as the Oulipio. Oulipians were into ‘literary bondage’, where their fetish resided in the notion that writing needs always be constrained by something, some rule, like omitting a particular consonant or sitting in the same place for several days. The idea was that the constraint pushes the writer and the literature into a place it never would have gone.

Three o’clock is my least liked hour. When it arrives today, I trudge up the stairs to pop kernels of corn in oil. My phone hasn’t rung in nearly an hour. In between busy periods, I’m expected to write psychology-related blog posts. This one is about the art of travelling in your own city in light of everyone I know getting on aeroplanes. However, I have developed a pattern of unconsciously opening tabs and browsing overpriced cardigans. Last week I saw a woman in the most terrific orange mohair cardigan, and I haven’t been able to think about much else since. I told the woman so and, noticing the way our exchange made me feel good, I subsequently added ‘Benefits of Talking to Strangers’ to my list of blog posts to write. There are twenty-five minutes until four and I fall on the couch with the popped corn and think about amounting, then, anything. I decide to call The Man, he answers, and time passes easily this way. The calendar opposite the toilet reads April. I flip the page over, so it shows the month of May. My birthday is on a Friday this year. I circle it and feel silly. I will turn twenty-five.

When I give in and check Facebook, there is a succession of voice messages from Daisy asking if she can visit the deli for dinner tonight. I tell her yes and feel relieved to have a reason to shut my laptop soon. A WordPress weekly roundup banner lights up my phone, which tugs at something lodged deep inside me. The omission is becoming more significant, like a gaping wound I haven’t attended to. I don’t discuss the wound with Daisy, but it must be visible because it’s the first thing she asks me about. Is it like having a pet, Daisy asks. No, I say and take a sip of the Thai beer in my hand. It’s more like being in a relationship with someone in that it is both intimate, romantic, and full of sacrifice. In the same way you might neglect a relationship and your partner grows unsatisfied and unhappy, so too does this. Except, in this case, you are both the neglect-or and the neglect-ee. It’s complicated, I say, looking at all my books. I tip the beer upside down so the last of it falls down my throat. It’s only now I notice the label has been entirely clawed off. Daisy nods seriously, then asks me to do something about it.

I fill a mug with English Breakfast and pluck a paper from the pile, the one titled, The Handbook of Emotions. The author, Ed Deiner, is disapproving of Western conceptualisations of ‘Well-being’. Instead, he advocates for Aristotle’s version, which frames the impossible construct as the fulfilment of one’s ‘true’ potential. This is disparate from the well-being I observe all around me, which equates happiness with material wealth and financial security, evident in the succession of Teslas and BMWs that park in front of the deli each day. Aristotle instead believed in a kind of moral happiness called Eudemonia, which isn’t so much a fluctuating emotional state one can appease with hits of serotonin and dopamine but a far-reaching feeling of balance and satisfaction that develops when a person engages in their purpose. In this way, Aristotle’s happiness cannot be isolated to one blissful or successful moment, rather, it is an activity one must cultivate and maintain over an entire lifespan. Deiner believes this departure from Aristotle explains the landslide in Western well-being today.  

When my neighbour the tailor brings in the sign today and sends me a wave, I decide I will also call it a day. As I control-S, the bald man who approached me at Black-Gold appears at the front window. I notice he is on his way home from grocery shopping and that his dog has on a green jersey with white polka dots today. The man introduces himself as Tim. Tim asks me what I’m always doing here at the front window and why I’m often staring outside rather than looking at the screen in front of me. It’s true, I think. I possess an attention bias to things beyond this computer screen. Then he tells me he is a photographer and that he’d like to take my photo from across the street soon. I agree and consider telling him I have taken a photo of him with my pen but become flustered and wish him a good night instead. I watch Tim disappear up the hill of my street and wave to the old alcoholic making his way slowly across the road. Perhaps this is what this is slowly amounting to: a psychogeography of the deli’s front window.

There is a man who looks to be in his sixties sitting on the ledge in the shallow end of the fifty-meter basin today. His arms are loosely folded, so they rest on the round of his belly. He has been sitting there in this sombre way since I hopped in thirty-five minutes ago. The way he is staring at the patch of water below him makes me think he is very much submerged in a memory. The fifty-meter basin invites these kinds of reveries. All the time I catch people swimming in one. It is this aspect, as well as the conversations I overhear in the changeroom and the brand-new feeling of walking out onto the street afterwards, that keeps me coming back to the basin. I hang around in the shallow end stretching and pulling at the nape of my neck. Finally, the man looks up and I send him a smile, which he catches and returns miserably. The clock says it’s four-forty, though it feels far later than this and I decide I will stop on my way home for a glass of wine to write something down.

Now I’m sitting at a high top in a wine bar up the road from the pool. My relatively new computer sounds old from all the statistical coding programs I have subjected it to, as though it’s about to take off like a plane pulling away from the tarmac. I feel nervous to start writing as if to start means to realise I’ve forgotten how. Instinctively, I open a Facebook tab and there is a voice message from Em that wasn’t there fifteen minutes ago asking if I can pick them up from the airport in two days’ time. I look up from the screen and out the wine bar’s window in an attempt to define the last three weeks but only see the view from the deli’s front window, the awful owner of Barnett’s Wigs. I want to grab and plug the time that is pouring through this body, through all the bodies, sitting here drinking wine right now. There are two women at the table to my left who look to be about thirty. Let me tell you I’m in a great place, one woman says to the other confidently. This makes me smile and reflect on my own well-being and what I need to do to sustain it. The waiter drops the glass of Riesling I ordered to my table, and I close the Facebook browser, disconnect from the internet, and open a blank Word document.