...Got Lost and Found the Swiss Alps via a Thermos

"Lost and Found" on Smith Street is my Happy Place. Adam Sandler has a golf course inhabited by dwarfs in chaps; I have an indoor second-hand market in Fitzroy. Horses for courses, I guess.

While I do like adorning myself, and wherever I live, with vintage in all it's bedazzled, gold trimmed, baker-lite glory, "Lost and Found" isn't my Happy Place because of what I can hand over money for and take home with me. I love it because the music is always "just so". I love that the boards of the warehouse shell it's contained in have a little bit of give that only age can bring. And I love that while you're making those measured, peaceful steps amongst the merchandise and creaking boards, people don't come up to you to ask "how you're doing". In fact, in the labyrinthine nooks and crannies created by racks of clothes and shelves of jewelery (and crocheted rugs and ceramic lamps and snakeskin handbags) you feel utterly and complete lost in your own world of curiosities.

Whatever my life is when I step back out out those doors on Smith Street, just isn't there for those few moments when all the objects "not of our time" transport me somewhere else. To a sheepskin rug that was under my Zia's coffee table that I used to lie on when I was only three or four and run my fingers through over and over. To tin cups in different metallic 70s shades, that my Grandma and I used to drink out of when the house she lived in was being renovated and all the china was still in boxes. To my Pop's flat I went to only rarely, where I'd eat Choc Royals and watch Sesame Street on a big, old wooden TV with a round screen and brass dials, with the picture coming out in strange, faded colours.

There's also the sheer thrill of the unexpected at "Lost and Found". You never know quite what you'll find. Never. Which is special, considering that so little in your day to day life has the potential to bring you that teeny-tiny joy of something off the map. Maybe you can assume there will be fur coats that smell like moth balls, a range of printed nylon scarves, gold clip on earrings, perhaps a retro telephone stand... but other than that? You're in a foreign land where anything is possible. Where a gentle chaos reigns as to which curios and memories of the not-so-distant past have found there way there. Like when I visited a few days ago, I found an orange tartan-pattern Thermos in the exact style I'd found in a Salvation Army Store about five years ago (but have long since lost). One of my good friends had only just last week been talking about my slightly compulsive ritual of sitting out the back of the store we worked in, eating my soup out of this old Thermos almost every single day. She also mentioned how jealous she was of it at the time. Yes, my dears, she was jealous of a $7 Thermos from the Salvation Army. Which, in her defense, I can understand. I loved that Thermos as intensely as anyone could love an item of kitchenware without having it develop into some kind of disorder. The thing was, and still is, that there really isn't anything in the modern Tupperware arsenal with as much panache as on old school Thermos in mint condition.

And, so, in the Tale of Two Thermoses, here I was in "Lost and Found" five years/ one week on and I'd found another one. Conjured up out of the ether and just waiting quietly for me. Like I'd pulled up outside the train station to collect it with all of its bags to take it home - as if that had been the plan all along. So going back today to take possession of the Thermos in order to gift it to my friend, I had another wander through. And you know what I found? The Swiss Alps. So I decided to take them home with me. For only $8, how could I refuse?

...Met God and Found it a Little Underwhelming

I don't believe in God. This was cemented for me around the time my goldfish died and it became clear to me that it didn't get to go to heaven. And even if I made it a plastic take-away container coffin lined with tissues, rather than flush it down the loo, it didn't change that fact. So in my mind, if the fish wasn't going to heaven, then my dog wouldn't be going to heaven. And if my dog wouldn't be going to heaven, then I also, most likely, would not be going there either. Why? Because we all had brains and eyes and mouths, so why did my set of those things qualify me for heaven but not Apricot Fish and Toby? It didn't make sense. It was far more logical to conclude that heaven just didn't exist. It was a whole “I’m six and have just set off an existential chain reaction” kind of thing. Part of me wishes it could have come a little later in life, but don't cry for me Argentina: while I couldn't hold on to God, at least I did get to hold on to Santa Claus for a few more years. Beggars can't be choosers.

Saying that, though, a decade later I did manage to create my own deities to worship. To replace the God I had lost with Apricot Fish's passing, when I was sixteen and discovering the power of being a girl and being angry, I managed to develop the self-made holy trinity of Germaine Greer (the father), Naomi Wolf (the son) and Courtney Love (I'm guessing that leaves her as the holy ghost. Makes sense - she sure could wail).

And despite having progressed through the following decade of my life from that point to marvel at Germaine Greer digging in a foxhole of increasing craziness, and to witness Ms Love's fall from the "elegantly wasted" grunge A-list to the Z-list position of celebrity roadkill addicted to plastic surgery and prescription medication: I've still always had Naomi Wolf. The Beauty Myth. So insightful. So relevant. And still relevant two decades later. It responded in shock to the fact we were losing a generation of women to bulimia and anorexia with no international epidemic being announced. Without even any questioning of what could be driving so many, from one gender all over the developed world, to start starving themselves to death. It challenged the unquestioned mandate the media seemingly had to present women however they wanted: with no cellulite, no body hair, and no thighs for that matter. It also altered the way that women thought about those images of themselves they were being presented. It dared to say – you’re apparently through the glass ceiling, sweetheart, but this is why you still don’t feel you got anywhere.

It was the bible for new feminism.

So with Naomi Wolf's visit this week to Melbourne, upon being offered a ticket to see "God" speak, I was of course ecstatic. At the possibility that God, through some fluke of my work connections, was going to perhaps grant me a personal audience? I couldn’t even function. But after hearing the sermon delivered I was left... a little cold. There was nothing ecclesiastical in that auditorium for me. Her argument was ill defined, lacking intellectual rigor and delivered with a boisterous LA accent (that particularly grated during the section where she advised a member of the audience to take up meditation as a way to "counteract negative thoughts"). After that, when I was finally introduced and got to shake her hand - to literally touch God - I'm glad there was no time to say anything. I felt cheated. As a disciple I came away feeling as though I were better equipped to spread the doctrine than the oracle herself.

Perhaps it’s a warning about creating false idols? Or maybe just that Christianity sure has it worked out: they've set it up so that the author of the text can never present themselves to disappoint. One’s deities sure are best kept at arm's length.

You never want to deal with something as tricky as the medium getting in the the way of a good message.

...Thought about Grande Dame Germaine

Germaine Greer changed my life. I was sixteen and disenchanted with being the cute, short girl with blond hair. I WAS the cute, short girl with blond hair but I was also so much more than that. Hamlet was my favourite play. I owned a fox terrier named Ted. I was afraid of the dark (even at sixteen). I got straight A+'s. I spoke Japanese. I'd survived the many wars that involved my respective family members. I could play the violin. I liked sushi and sci-fi and was a shit-hot debater. But I felt like all that people saw was the blond and the cute and the short. And the really horrible part of that was - I felt like I was just meant to put up with it.

But one night I was researching ideas for an art folio and I stumbled across an an extract from The Female Eunuch and it changed all that. Something exploded in my brain. It put a finger on why I felt frustrated about walking on to a crowded train carriage and not only feeling like I was there to be stared at but that I was also expected to play along, to play up to it, to look away quietly so I could be looked at. It helped me suddenly make sense of why I liked listening to Courtney Love screaming out of my stereo about being pissed off that she was made of "doll parts". It made me cut off my hair. It made me wear only Doc Marten boots for three years. It made me start sticking my middle finger up at the cars full of men who honked their horns at me when I was just trying to walk down the street with my friends.

It made me who I am today.

And I wear lipstick. I shave my arm pits. I love to wear as many items of personal apparel as possible adorned with cute little animal trinkets. But to all you haters out there who would take that as evidence to call the revolution off - it don't make me a cog in the machine. I am a feminist. And I could explain the ins and outs of that in all kinds of fancy language (and I have the degree to prove it), but I don't need to. All you need to know is that Germaine Greer changed my life. So I leave you with this. Courtesy of Grande Dame Germaine...

Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.

Respect.