Once, I was a girl.

I'm getting my period, so my breasts are like whoa-hoa, and even my sports bra is struggling with this new load. This morning, as I roughly readjusted them, like a breast-feeding mother, I returned to the summer of 1997; all steamy in North Melbourne suburbia. For me, it was a time of floppy-haired boybands, Leonardo DiCaprio, and backyard trampolines.

On one particular evening, after an ICQ chat, I made a run for the trampoline, brimming with pride at my launch onto the warm and softened taurpaulin. Each jump brought me a coloured still-shot of neighbouring families eating their BBQ dinners, or running stump-to-stump in ritualistic cricket matches.

I had a routine. First I would jump sky high, then I would throw myself into a tight somesault. Back on my feet, I would fall on my arse, with legs outstreched in a 'V'. Then: on my feet, on my back, on my feet, somersault round, on my feet, on my stomach, on my back, on my feet. This could go on for hours, much to the bemusement of my mother, who would then have to call me in for dinner. On this particular evening, it only lasted until the "on my stomach" part as two sharp points of pain exploded in my chest. Winded, and clutching at my new boobs, I clambered off my old friend and ran off into the house.

For a long time after, I would observe the backyard trampoline from my kitchen with suspicion and contempt. I no longer paid heed to the white-flap of instructions, frayed and flapping in the breeze. I made certain to leave the trampoline in direct sunlight and when the pigeons shat all over it, I didn't scramble over with a wet cloth before the acidity ate through the plastic. And once I took up swimming as my main sport, the trampoline was shamed and relocated to the corner of the yard.

Summer soon moved on, and I was swimming in local heats. Naked in the changeroom afterwards, I would savour the click my new training bar would make, as I pretended I needed to readjust my breasts so that they would fit better. The other girls were jealous.

It was 1998; I had gotten over Leonardo DiCaprio; and I didn't even notice when the trampoline was given away to the younger family next door, until I got a still-shot of the girl in the sky. Up she jumped. Then somersaulted. Then she was back on her feet, on her back, on her feet, and then a really good V...

Iron Deficient

I'm walking around the city, being dogged by spinach cravings and feel that everything is slightly off today. Spring has finally pushed through the relentlessness of Winter, and on her insistence, this giant organism of a place has been sent into a frenzy. The streets, in spectacular resurrection, have flung up four months' worth of dust into the sky and enthusiastic commuters, with not enough hands for the ice-creams and cold drinks they're clambering after, are riding bikes, stockingless.

The gargantuan National Theatre, with its strong sand-stone architecture, has taken on a softer, pinkish hue. For a moment I pretend I am in Rome, before, tangentially, I am reminded of the fact that Poland almost held Madascar as a colony. This amusing caprice of history does not escape me and I slowly move my tongue over the words: Pax Romana, Pax Polonia.

Spring in Warsaw offers me my own personal history too, with this vivid regeneration stunning me with accute memories. As the new sun struggles to beat its rays through the city smog, I'm reminded of that crazy 2006-2007 summer when the bushfires, encroaching in on Melbourne, shrouded suburbia with smoke. I'm in Europe, with nary a gum-tree in sight, yet I think I am on Lygon St with the very particular smell of burning eucalypts sneaking into my nose.

I cross Swietokrzyska (haha), with its tooting taxis and impatient crowds, and let the descending humidity take me back to that brief time in Vietnam. It's enough to make me want to pull up a crate to mediocre British company and have a 20 cent beer from a dirty keg. And I really wouldn't be hard-pressed to trade in the stodgy Polish diet for a bowl of crisp baby spinach with slivers of braised pork. Hell, I even want to accosted by frantically waving mo-ped drivers, yelling in tongue I could only ever hope to master. There are frantic Vietnamese in Warsaw, certainly, but this is not their home and they look sad.

The city is in a process of rebirth , but its being slightly obstinate. On Plac Pilsudskiego, an image of a messianic Pope John Paul II is eerily projected onto the wall of an old building. The Pope, somehow neon-fantastic, flickers for a few seconds before disappearing to be replaced by something that I don't quite manage to catch. Everywhere I look there are plaques commemorating dead people and finished wars; all of them directing my reluctant gaze to the bulletholes in pre-war motar. It appears that Spring is here, but Poland doesn't want to be completely reborn.

I move away from Plac Pilsudskiego feeling a bit disenchanted and disconnected from the warm fronts colliding behind me. As I enter the penetrative lighting of Mini Europa, I direct my attention to the spinach cravings, growing irksomely stronger by the minute and think that, yeah, rebrith and regeneration are good, but I really don't want to be pregnant.

Before I say anything else.

Dear friend who called me from his father's mobile (despite having rather antagonist relations with said father, and despite being a bit of a psychotic weirdo that dances funny) just to make me feel better when I said I was sad,

You are the best.

XOX

Ode to Gin

Recently I've noticed a common theme emerging from the blogs of friends and acquaintances: that of gin. This delightful drink, in most of the entries, is treated with an air of reverence; a reverence not often bestowed on its close friends, beer and wine.

According to the entries, gin is what we drink when we are delightfully curled up on our porch couch, swapping witticisms. Similarly, it seems that it is gin which makes any launch go from a church hall filled with geeky twenty-somethings, into a gallery frequented by people that previously featured on Kate Moss's party list. Gin, my friends, is what makes a duck turn into a swan.

And of course, ever the Social Sciences graduate, I felt the need to quantify this dependency. So voila- do what you will with the following statistics:

Pusia: 1 (certainly NOT representative of my Gin-swigging)

Mary K: 10 (technically I don't know Mary K, but she really does she love gin)

Dave: 0

Eli: 0

Jono: 0

Daniel: 0

And remarkably:

Jess: 17/over a 100

Gelatinous Hands: 20/43

Is there any point mentioning that the only people indulging in this subject are women? Let's let the wisdom of the delightfully Irish Dylan Moran decide:

"The most dangerous drink is gin- you have to be really, really careful with that. And you also have to be 45, female and sitting on the stairs."

So yeah..stairs.....and statistics......and gin.

Regress

I never thought Father Time to be synonymous with irony; but not so long ago the lord reared his head in such a spectacular fashion, that one could only call it ironic.

He came, when I was prepared to give everything of away; sold, in the hope that I would feature in some folkloreish story of love, honour and all things that transcend time and space. And because Father Time is synonymous with irony, he took everything away, with neither an apology or an IOU. At the time, I believed it to be a swift, brief (albeit, acute) attempt made on my life, from which I could move from with excuses of rationale, and more narcissitically, matyrdom.

But no. Because tonight Father Time gently nudged me again; a reminder that he'd neither forgotten or relented from his quest to make me fall to my knees.

And now, walking down Krakowskie Przedmiescie, with katabatic winds rushing past me, I can hear three soleful bell tolls ringing through the dead of the night. And I'm really shit scared that Father Time may be descending on me once more, his bedraggled greying beard trailing through history.

But what worries me most is not this man himself. What worries me is that I resent him and his sinister flare for circumstance, when he could in fact be my one deliverance from evil.

I want to olac it all.

Me and language are having it out. A big stand-off where I'll probably end up throwing in the towel and retreating to my new life as a mute monk on the island of Avon. Yes, it's that bad.

It's been a long time coming. For months I have been entertaining Polish and English separately; spending long, nurturing quality time with one only to pike on it for long beer-infused jaunts around Warsaw with the other.

This may sound like a simple excuse for a blog post, but dear readers (yes, all five of you), it's so much more than that. I am going through a linguistic crisis; a crisis that I would love to share with you if only I could find the words in the appropriate language.

When Polish and English kept their distance from each other I was happy to gaily skip between them and stay for as long as they would have me. In hard times, I would give myself up to one, happy for the prepositions to fix me in time and space, until I was ready to emerge from my chrysalis- like state to be betwixt and between once more.

But the bastards must have been slowly, insiduously ganging up on me because today I found myself standing on the balcony, in minus eight-degree fun, unable to properly phrase a simple SMS. The recipient was patiently waiting several hundred kilometres away as I dumbly tried to translate jestem pod wrazeniem into English.

Jestem pod wrazeniem could be transliterated to mean I'm impressed. "Aha!" you say, "That makes complete sense in English. Where's the gin?"

BUT. IT. DOESN'T.

It does nothing to convey the nuances of meaning that come rushing forth as soon as the phrase is uttered (whether you be the utterer or the utteree). Jestem pod wrazeniem means I am under the impression (not to be confused, however, with the stoic way anglophones use it).

It rather evokes the feeling of being coldly knocked down by the full weight of something's fantasticness. Or maybe it's more that you are labouring under history, life and death; EVERYTHING that matters. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but you certainly have been rendered stupid and can probably only manage whispering a respectful "wow".

Or, my favourite: zeby przezywac. Apart from being the name of the best Hole album released, (to) Live Through This, is the closest I can come to approximating the above meaning. When I say ja to przezywam, I mean that I am crawling through the mud of some post-apocalyptic landscape looking for what's left of my family. Of course, I usually only use this when my local shop has run out of my favourite rolls.

Then there's pretensja. I come up against this word often, as my mother does a good job of being it. As I can't hyperlink (ho ho) her into this post, I'll just have to rely on the assumption that mothers are the same everywhere. Zeby miec pretensje is not dissimilar to to have a gripe with someone. But to have a gripe with someone doesn't remind me of middle-aged woman incessantly whining and interfering with everything sacred in my life. This meddling middle-aged woman doesn't have a gripe with someone, she has pretensja.

Perhaps it has something to do with Poland's "problems", that the above are imbued with such extreme emotions; that they can floor you, that they can stupify you, that they can lead you to have embarrassing tantrums at the age of 22. Centuries of rising and falling, of struggling to assert Polishness, of the constant threat of the other, tends to colour your language more vibrantly. The quotidien has known times when buying those rolls really was something zeby przezywac. I am impressed, on the other hand, sounds like it should be served up with tea and a conservative smattering of bonmots.

In any case, all I know is that when I am standing out on the balcony, having a cigarette, I don't want to have deal with this sort of shit; I just want to write a message to someone. So from now on I will type jestem pod wrazeniem in Polish, select SEND and go inside to have a nice, quiet cup-o-tea.

Paulina 1
Language 0.

A play on words with gratification of the baked kind

So it appears that in times of crisis I do the following:

-Eat biscuits that I bought to present as a gift to someone (who is not me).
-Walk around in circles making puns TO MYSELF. ALONE.
-Dust off my deserted and poorly-named blog.

The crisis is as following:

OH MY GOD I'M MOVING IN WITH MY FRIEND BUT I DON'T KNOW WHERE TO START WITH THE PACKING WHY DOESN'T THAT GUY AT FOLLOW UP ON THAT OFFER OF BEER THAT HE ONCE AWKWARDLY MADE WHEN I WAS OFF TO A DATE WITH SOMEONE ELSE WHO IS DREADFULLY BORING AND ONLY WEARS WHITE T-SHIRTS WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE WHERE ARE MY STOCKINGS WHY IS IT SO COLD WHAT SHOULD I CHOOSE FOR MY MA I MISS MELBOURNE WHERE AM I GOING TO STUDY WHERE AM I GOING TO TRAVEL TO NEXT. Etc.

As for the poorly-named blog....I didn't ever expect to have any commitment to it past Vietnam. My boyfriend at the time said it was a stupid name. It is, but well WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES KIDS AND NOW WE HAVE TO GRIN AND BEAR IT (at least two of those mistakes are acknowledged in this paragraph).

In any case: goodbye Ulica Zelazna (Iron Street). Your spiteful stove and vermin have been good to me.

Love,

Paulina