Originally published by The Clifton Courier, July 7, 2021

Do you believe in signs?

I obviously don’t mean that in a literal sense. I generally tend to accept that most signs are telling me the truth when they’re warning me about electric fencing or overhead powerlines. Like, they’re just trying to help. What have they got to gain from lying to me, you know?

When I’m talking signs, I’m talking about the signals from the universe that you’re on the right track or you’re making a big mistake or that you should put it all on red.

I once had a dream where I kept repeating a bunch of numbers over and over to the point that, when I woke up, I could still recall those numbers. I figured it could possibly be my psychic subconscious doing me a solid and giving me a heads up about the winning lotto numbers. I mean, the fact that those numbers came to me so clearly surely had to mean something. When something comes to you in a dream, there has to be some reason for it, right? So I went out and bought a lotto ticket.

I didn’t win a dime.  

If nothing else, this sign from the universe that came to me in a dream was perhaps a sign from the universe that I shouldn’t be reading too much into signs from the universe.

I think choosing to read something into those “came to me in a dream” moments is what makes them so powerful. Like, if you’re looking for a sign to tell you that you need to change jobs/dump your partner/get a blunt fringe, then I think what you can learn from that is that, deep down, you probably really want to change jobs/dump your partner/get a blunt fringe and you’re desperate for some external, all-knowing force to justify your decision. 

But there’s something so intoxicating about the idea that some cosmic force is taking an interest in my life and is trying to communicate something to me. Part of this is because I can’t emotionally cope with the fact that everything that happens to us is all a cruel accident and part of it is because I’m a closet romantic but the biggest part is because I’m incredibly self-obsessed.

Usually, these signs come by way of streetlights. 

Sometimes when I pass a streetlight while out walking alone, one will turn off. Sometimes one will turn on. 

And, look, logic would tell me this was a sensor or self-timer situation. But that terrified, romantic and self-obsessed person in me likes to think it’s a signal from the universe. There’s usually no one else around when this happens. The streets are generally empty. Surely that light turning on or off is only doing so for me, right?

Maybe the light turned on because my last thought was actually a really, really good idea. Maybe the light turned off because cosmic forces are telling me to let go of the idea/person/hair style I was just thinking about. And sometimes, I take it as a vague sign that there’s something… more to ponder.

In Year Nine I played one of two slags in roller-skates in a scaled-back, reimagined production of Waiting for Godot. In this high school iteration of the classic play, the dead tree was replaced by a streetlight that turned on and then back off again without our characters noticing.

So I suppose I was primed to take notice of the streetlights and attempt to listen to what they’re trying to say. And, let’s be honest, the symbolism of a streetlight is too delicious to ignore. 

But then something happened for the first time the other day. 

I was walking along the footpath that runs past the creek/stormwater drain that keeps my neighbourhood from flooding. Usually it’s full of stinky wastewater with a system of gates and pipes regulating the flow. 

Just as I walked past the other day, the valve opened. All this stinky wastewater came gushing out at the exact second I passed it. And if you apply the same logic to this as you do my streetlight thing, you have to attach some kind of meaning to this too.

Unfortunately, the only message that comes to mind is that, perhaps, I just might be full of poo… in the proverbial sense. 

Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June 30, 2021

I think we need another word for the consumption of soup. 

A week or so ago I was writing about a soupy experience when I had a thought. I was about to type that I had been “eating soup” and I realised that was kind of a lie. I wasn’t doing any chewing when I was ingesting the soup, so I felt like “eating” was the wrong verb. 

But then to say that I was “drinking soup” sounded weird.

That conjures up an image of me chugging a glass of soup like it was a cold glass of milk after a long run on a hot summer’s day (it’s like a workout recovery shake… but plain. Would recommend).

I almost unpacked this thought using 28 words in a set of brackets within that column but I decided that, rather than making a concise point, I could ramble on about it for more than 600 words.

The next day at work, I noticed someone with a container of soup at their desk and hit them with the big questions. Here’s a rough outline of what I accosted my colleague with:

“Do you say that you’re eating soup? Because technically you’re not really chewing the soup, you’re drinking it.”

She raised the counter point that you can chew the soup chunks, so you’re doing some actual eating there.

“Hmm yeah, I guess, but would you say you drink the soup and eat the chunks? Like, are the soup chunks the actual soup itself or are they just chunks? Like, is the soup just the liquid around the chunks? What is a soup, really?”

Pretty deep, huh?

The point my learned colleague about the chunks was an interesting one. Does that mean you can truthfully say you’re eating soup so long as it has chunks? What does that mean for chunk-less soups like, say, a creamy pumpkin? Do we need to have different words for soups based on their chunkiness? 

Personally, I don’t think we say “eating soup” because of the way the soup goes down our gullets. I think it’s more abstract. In fact, I think it’s something to do with our unconscious food biases. 

I’m wondering if the reason we say we’re eating soup is because it’s savoury and mostly vegetable-based. That’s not to say that we only associate the word “eat” with savoury and “drink” with sweet. But you have to admit, we have many more sweet drinks – Milo, juice, Enos… – than we do savoury drinks. Like, I wouldn’t say a dry white wine or a beer is sweet, but I wouldn’t call them savoury. I’d put the more in a neutral category. 

When you think about it, a smoothie is much like a soup. It’s liquefied plant matter. It is a blend of multiple ingredients. It’s thicker than water and, often can be thicker and therefore heartier than of some of the more broth-y soups on dining tables around the country. A smoothie is like a desert soup.

And yet we don’t say that we’re eating a smoothie, but we do say that we’re eating soup. 

It’s not because soups are hot and smoothies are cold. Because as we all know from that BOYBB episode of The Simpsons where Lisa tries to get people not to eat meat by offering up gazpacho, soup can be served ice cold.

So perhaps it’s something to do with the mode of ingestion. A smoothie typically makes its way into your body via a straw, while the soup gets there by individual spoonfuls.  

Instead of saying “eating soup” or “drinking soup” you could say “spooning soup into your mouth” but it sounds like you’re binging on soup with concerning gusto. And you could also say “slurping soup” but that sounds more like you’re being a slob rather than daintily consuming a liquefied savoury concoction in an extremely polite manner. 

So what’s the answer? Do we just skirt around the issue forever? Do we abolish soup from our diets so we never have to address the issue again? Or do we just carry on with our lives because it doesn’t really matter that much, in the grand scheme of things?

Tough to say.