Back in Aus

I’ve landed in Australia! My child has turned 2!

I took a business week off for the process of traveling back from the U.K., (stopped in Singapore for a few days to break the journey, because 26 hours preg with toddler felt like… a lot) and now I’m back I want to make sure this Patreon is as good as it can be. So feel free to message me if you have ideas of what you’d like more or less of. I can’t guarantee I’ll meet all demands, but I’ll definitely think hard about all suggestions.

The first weekend of being in Australia has been second birthday celebrations for Laser Fraser, and jet lag and to a certain extent putting off organising life and work because it’s not really possible to do properly concentrated work until i can get some childcare hours strung together.

BUT I have been getting my feet back on the ground with Writers Meetings, Salons and The Gargle, and those feel like the drumbeat to which the rest of my work-life can start to rev back up. Organising things is a strange liminal space and I can never tell if I enjoy it or really resent it.

On one hand, it’s sort of an exercise in imaginative projection, and it’s nice to think about how things might work, or cool projects that might happen. On the other hand, it’s also exhausting because you sort of have to send a version of yourself off into that future world (living in this flat, writing this kind of show), and it’s not necessarily an outcome that’s in your control. And not all the imaginative projection is of fun things.

The question of childcare for example is less a fun imagination process than it is a balance of budget, availability, reading online reviews from cranky parents who sound awful, potential levels of care or neglect, etc etc etc etc etc. One unspoken cost of traveling with family is auditioning people in each new place and trying to figure out if it’s safe to let your baby play with them while you write jokes in the corner like the weirdest gremlin.

Also, need to be looking for a proper place to rent over the giving-birth-and-new-baby bit. At the moment we’re in a lovely short term place down the road from my twin brother, but as they say “holiday rentals don’t last til Christmas, they wind up in mid November” (they don’t say that, but in this instance it’s true).

Having decided to take a step back from standup/live work for a bit, I’ve determined that I need to seek out writing, TV opportunities, podcast projects etcetera, for the purposes of you know, still working and feeding the fam (but knowing in 3 months I’ll be offline for… however long that new-baby-alternate-dimension-altered-state bit takes this time?) so what do I prioritise? What do I push for?

Do I start throwing big ideas at the wall or do I just roll on in a bare maintenance mode or will that make me feel even more like I’ve stepped out of life and am settling for a backroom version of my art/ambition than moving (however temporarily) to a small coastal town (with - dark secret???) in Queensland already has?

Laser Fraser is now two years old, and has a fever and was up all night, and if anyone’s looking for a shortcut to feeling existential may I recommend that combo?

Xxx

A