I Am Fine. (I Am Not Fine.)

This week I have been in a foul mood, and I mean the kind of foul mood where everything, whether rational or irrational, is deeply and personally offensive to my existence.

I genuinely cannot explain it, and believe me I have tried, cycling through the usual suspects with the dedication of someone who really should have just gone for a walk instead. It could be a full moon. It could be that I am forty-two and my hormones have apparently decided to take an extended sabbatical without so much as a forwarding address or a polite note on the fridge. Whatever the cause, the result is identical: the world is annoying me, I am not sorry about it, and I have the list to prove it.

The list, for your reading pleasure and my inevitable conviction, includes but is not limited to: pollen, sneezing, wind (nature's wind, not the other kind), Italian pedestrians treating the footpath as their own personal runway, potholes, cobblestones, the smell of something indeterminate and deeply unpleasant that periodically ambushes at unsuspecting moments, dog poo (a constant irritation even on my best days), a certain nationality who are absolutely convinced they know everything despite not living here, tourists who consider a red pedestrian light at a five-way intersection more of a suggestion than a rule (a car or bus will eventually make that point more effectively than I can), running out of milk twice in one week despite being the sole person in this apartment consuming it, having to walk to the supermarket to rectify said milk situation, people on the bus breathing, people on the bus conducting full phone conversations at a volume usually reserved for stadiums, having to wake up in the morning, myself for eating lunch at my computer again, the voice of my usually beloved vloggers, having to make my own dinner, it not being the weekend yet, my own catastrophic inability to say no to things, American students conducting entire conversations at a frequency that made it physically impossible to concentrate during my Italian lesson, my tendency to overthink absolutely everything, my equally catastrophic people-pleasing, my own personality, not having a flat stomach yet somehow remaining unbothered enough to go to the gym or stop eating pasta daily, a general and pervasive lack of self-awareness across the broader human population, impoliteness, sometimes feeling completely invisible, and the rain.

My download person, the genuinely saintly Katrina, has absorbed approximately four days of this at close range and if she de-friends me after this week I will understand completely, send flowers, and not contest the decision.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about when you move somewhere new, which is that you slowly begin to realise what felt perfectly normal back home was actually not normal at all, just the particular flavour of consideration you grew up around and therefore never thought to question. Australians, on the whole, are a reasonably polite lot, perhaps it is the British inheritance, perhaps it is the smallish-city rhythm I was accustomed to, where you notice the people around you because there are not quite so many of them pressing into your personal space at all times. We smile at strangers back home, genuinely and without agenda, and there is even an unspoken game of it, a quiet daily tally of how many smiles you can collect from people you have never met and will likely never see again, "how many did you get today?" the kind of small social currency that costs nothing and somehow makes everyone feel marginally better about being alive. Try that here and you will be regarded with the deep suspicion reserved for people who stand too close on public transport (check that you haven’t been pickpocketed), and if you do it with any real enthusiasm you will probably be referred to a psychiatrist and injected with a sedative before you can explain that you are just Australian and this is simply how we are.

Here you are one of many, often one of thousands, and the tourists who pass through seem to operate on the collective understanding that the city exists purely as a backdrop for their content and their noise, the permanent residents an inconvenient extra who somehow wandered onto their set without being cast. They do whatever suits them, wherever suits them, at whatever volume suits them, and the cumulative effect on a forty-two-year-old woman whose hormones have clocked off without explanation is, let's say, not bringing out my most gracious qualities. This morning I told someone in rather forceful Italian to wait as I was exiting the bus through the exit door, which they had apparently decided was also a perfectly reasonable entrance door, simultaneously and at speed, because why wouldn't it be, and they looked genuinely startled, which I will admit gave me a satisfaction disproportionate to the event but entirely appropriate to the week I have had.

Today I also learned in my Italian lesson how to say "fucking," which for reference is fottutamente, meaning I can now correctly and grammatically express that today was fottutamente terribile (fucking terrible), a phrase that is both linguistically accurate and deeply cathartic to say out loud, and I also acquired fottiti, a compact and elegant expression for moments requiring somewhat more directness to tell someone to go and do something to themselves. I am genuinely looking forward to the day my brain operates quickly enough in Italian to deploy either of these in real time, because that will truly be a milestone worth celebrating.

The weekend cannot arrive soon enough, and I am holding onto the prospect of it the way I hold onto a block of chocolate at 3pm, desperately and with absolutely no intention of sharing. My plans are modest and entirely self-preserving: slow mornings, uninterrupted coffee, and enough stillness to remember that I do actually like this city, and possibly even myself, once the hormones return from wherever they have absconded to. If I make it through Friday without going postal and without Katrina having to locate bail money on my behalf, this week will be considered a roaring success, and I think that deserves its own round of applause and one or two well-earned spritz. I will report back, or alternatively keep an eye on international news outlets, and either way you will find out how this ends.

Notes from a brief moment on Wednesday in centro to pick up my Nespresso order.