The Ruminator

Best. Birthday. Ever

2006-02-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

My birthday was on Friday – yay! My brother and sister-in-law sent me a big, beautiful bunch of flowers, with a note that hoped I spent the weekend being spoiled by everyone. I have to say, mission accomplished, because I have just had a three day birthday festival!

My first, and incredibly special present, was from Pete – a couple of small paintings he did himself. There is something wonderful about a gift someone made, rather than bought, and when they have made it beautifully, it’s great!

I didn’t take the day off work, but that’s ok as I was spoiled there too – flowers, home baked cookies and cake, and an office lunch. [No commentary on the public service.] After work we met friends for drinks and dinner. It being my birthday, I didn’t have to buy a drink all night. Thanks everyone!

Saturday the birthday extravaganza continued with an early lunch with my parents at the National Library. A nice meal, presents, and a stroll around the terrace to look at the lake.

Saturday afternoon/evening was my birthday party – planned and executed with great precision by Pete. We had a bbq down by the lake – in Lennox Gardens for any Canberrans. We had plenty to keep us occupied – Frisbee, soccer, and the surprise hit [no pun intended] of the season – totem tennis! [Pat Rafter endorsed, naturally.] There was food enough to feed an army, including beautifully cooked rack of lamb. Competition from other picnicers for bbq space was fierce, but that’s ok, because Pete brought a bbq! The weather was great, it was good to spend time with everyone, and for the first time since childhood, I had a birthday party I didn’t have to organise myself.

On Sunday the birthday festival finally wound up with afternoon tea with my relatives. Over the three days I saw a lot of people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a while, received numerous calls and texts, thoughtful presents, great food and drink, and generally had a fantastic weekend. All in all – Best. Birthday. Ever.

A quick catch up

2006-02-03T23:21:00.000-08:00

I would like to be able to say 'OK, I haven't updated my blog for ages, but that's because I've been really busy doing ...' But I'm hard pressed to come up with stuff I have been really busy with. It's not like I've been studying, or deeply involved in charity work or something.

I have actually managed to spend some time with friends lately, which I'm very happy about. Regular Friday after work drinks are a great way to make sure you actually see all those friends of whom you might otherwise spend months saying, 'I really should call ----, we haven't spoken in ages!'

I think it's because we've all hit some stage in our lives, that makes it hard to keep up. Everybody is balancing decision time in major aspects of their lives - work, relationships, lifestyle - Save up to buy a house or keep renting and have money for travel, or a car, or new stuff? Change of career direction or corporate climb? Stability or a new challenge?

Some days it feels as if time is flying by. I'm lucky enough to still have some friends from school, and it seems amazing to think that where once we gossiped about the ups and downs of school, our parents, cute boys ... now it's careers, partners, mortgages ... Hmm, maybe nothing much has changed after all ...

Anyway, I'm glad my friends are still with me, and I'll try to make sure I take the time to appreciate them. We used to think we were sooooo sophisticated going out for a cappuccino and a muffin. So maybe we could go for a cocktail and some tapas? ;-)

What I did on my summer holiday

2006-01-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

Spent time with my family - a particularly good thing to do over Christmas. If only my brother and sister-in-law were here too.

Spent time with friends - both new friends I made in 2005, and friends from school and uni days, including visiting expatriates Doug, Jasmine and other Peter.

Spent a considerable amount of time gazing at the changing light over the lake (including some lovely sunsets), the wind in the trees, the pattern of birds across the sky, the shifting clouds, and the growth of healthy plants (not mine, unfortunately).

Learned how to mount photos (thanks Pete!), and decorated my apartment with pictures of my family and my recent travels.

Flew a kite.

Had many enjoyable meals including barbeques, picnics, lazy brunches, family dinners, and fish and chips.

Accompanied those meals with (as appropriate) champagne, cocktails (in which limes and or watermelon were major players), home made cappuccinos (thanks Pete!), ice creams, and lots of cold water.

Technically it wasn’t even a real holiday, just the office shutdown between Christmas and New Year. But somehow that little break felt like a proper getaway, even though I never left Canberra. It was one of those lovely retreats from everyday life that reminds you how unimportant work actually is in the grand scheme of things. I’m very grateful to have had this time, and I’m trying to hold onto that feeling into the new year.

Happy 2006 everyone. :-)

The good and the bad

2005-12-14T14:59:00.000-08:00

Good things that have happened in the past two weeks:
- I caught up with several friends I haven’t seen for a while, including Doug
- I saw the new Harry Potter movie, which was great fun, though I still like the third one best
- Pete and I did fun stuff like going for a drive in the open car and stopping for iced coffee, and sitting outside in the evening drinking vodka, lime and soda (not, I hasten to add, in conjunction with the driving)
- Our frisbee team won the final game of the season by 9 points
- I starting acting in a job at a higher level
- I got some Christmas shopping done.

Bad things that have happened in the past two weeks:
- Someone tried to break into my car when it was parked under my apartment building during the day and now the lock is broken and I have to get into the car via the passenger side door and then climb over the gear stick and it’s really annoying not to mention embarrassing especially when everyone outside the shops is staring at me trying to climb through the car when wearing a skirt...

OK, I feel much better now, I'm done whinging. Put into perspective, I’m certainly not hard done by. In fact, I lead a very fortunate life. I should pause to remember that more often.

RIP Mr Miyagi

2005-11-27T03:02:00.000-08:00

Mr Miyagi, a.k.a Pat Morita, real name Noriyuki Morita, has passed away aged 73.

Like many who were kids in the 80s, I loved the Karate Kid. It had everything - martial arts action, hormonal teenagers, eastern mysticism... And that goofy little guy with the exaggerated accent was an unexpected, and totally kick ass, action star.

Rest in peace Mr Miyagi. A little piece of the 80s died with you.

Experimental Cookery - Episode 1

2005-11-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

I suspect I am not alone in having several cookbooks that look good on my shelf, but which I have never used for anything more than browsing through and thinking, ‘that looks nice’.

In the spirit of personal improvement I have invoked on this website in the past, I have resolved that every time I do a big grocery shop, I will pick a new recipe, buy all the ingredients, and prepare the meal in the following week.

With the able assistance of my dinner guest / guinea pig / assistant chef / dishwasher Pete, I set out to prepare Experiment Number 1 – pork medallions on a minted pea puree.

The verdict - not too bad for a first try. I think my major failing as a chef is getting everything going simultaneously so that it is all ready at the right time – so half the meal isn’t either over or under cooked while the other half is cooling on the table. Or making sure we don’t nibble so much cheese while cooking that we’re half full before dinner is ready.

But definitely a resolution worth sticking to – we shall see how long my enthusiasm lasts. In the meantime I’ll be picking up some new skills, trying new things, and avoiding takeaway food, so that’s all good.

And if anyone needs any minted pea puree, there’s still quite a bit left over. :-)

Online and unhooked

2005-10-30T01:49:00.000-08:00

I finally did it - I finally got around to getting broadband connection at home. And while I was at it, a wireless modem. It's fantastic! I can surf the net while sitting on my balcony drinking gin and tonic! Or while sitting on the couch watching tv! (Or a lot of other places in my apartment, but I won't disturb you with that.) And it's speedy. And convenient. (Almost too convenient. I can see the new iTunes store being a real danger to my bank account.)

Not that I need iTunes to spend too much money - I'm a danger to my bank balance all on my own. The picture was taken with my brand new digital camera. Add to that my iPod Mini, and that's a lot of gadgets I've bought this year.

Yay!

Can’t cook, can’t read maps

2005-10-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, it seems that not only is it “not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics,” (thanks Stephen Hawking), apparently we can’t cook either.

Irritating British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has declared that women, unlike men, don’t know how to cook these days, and “once declared that he would not employ women in key roles because the menstrual cycle rendered them effective for only three weeks a month.”

And a study has shown women will read novels by both men and women, but men will generally only read novels written by other men. Which is why people like JK Rowling and PD James publish under their initials. (I didn’t realise PD James was a woman, or 85 years old either, but there you go.)

Not that I take the comments of one guy renowned as a great chef but a real tosser, and one guy renowned as a genius but a grump (or a tyrant according to his ex-wife), and think this necessarily says something about society in general. (Actually, if I was Stephen Hawking, I’d probably be pretty damn grumpy too).

But it’s not just comments like these that are bad – sometimes the reaction is just as disturbing. "Women are much more passionate than men in the kitchen and cook from the heart while men are more mathematical, and women don't throw pots and pans."

I’m sorry, but I find that just as irritating as being told that I can’t cook in the first place. It’s just buying into that whole women are nurturing and intuitive, and men are logical and angry and blah, blah Venus vs. Mars blah.

I’m instantly suspicious of anything that attempts to explain the world in terms of a simple dichotomy, as if there were only ever two choices, two ways of thinking or being in any situation – male/female, black/white, left wing/right wing… Can’t we have some nuance in our lives? Some complexity? I reserve the right to be logical, intuitive, emotional, passionate, calm, nurturing, selfish, crap at maths, good at reading maps, a haphazard cook, an occasional risk taker, an over analyser, and a whole lot of other things which I believe have everything to do with being a human and little do with my chromosomes or girly bits.

Anyway, maybe I’m just overreacting. Must be because I’m a girl.

Fighting spam one step at a time

2005-10-12T15:44:00.000-07:00

My apologies for the minor inconvenience, but I've had to enable the word verification on my comments system. Hopefully this will stop any more automatic spamming of the comments (spamming being responsible for the deleted comments on a couple of my recent posts). Spammers are evil.

Embarrassingly Girly Moment No. 1382

2005-10-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

The game was fast, furious and fun. The players gave their all. The scores were fairly even. And I … twisted my ankle and spent much of the game on the sideline with a plastic bag full of ice.

I realise that twisting an ankle is not a gender specific experience, especially on a sports field liberally sprinkled with rocks. (I stepped on one, felt my ankle go sideways, and fell down - The End.) But there just still seems something stereotypically girly about it. Fortunately I only pulled this move in a game of ultimate frisbee, as opposed to, say, bushwalking in a remote and inaccessible area, or fleeing certain death at the hands of an unstoppable killing machine from a post-apocalyptic future.

So that’s probably OK then.

On the plus side, the team put in a very solid effort, including some excellent work by the very new newbies. And the post-game beer and pizza went down a treat :-).

A happy discovery

2005-10-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

Apparently, I’m not as unfit as I thought I was. This heart-warming personal discovery came last night, courtesy of my first competitive game of Ultimate Frisbee.

For those of you who don’t know, Ultimate Frisbee is sort of like non-contact football, only with a frisbee, obviously. Since a frisbee can travel a long way very quickly, the game involves a lot of running, then changing direction quickly, and running some more.

I’m fundamentally opposed to the notion of running, unless being chased, and I certainly can’t understand the concept of running as an activity of itself, either for exercise or fun (a ‘Fun Run’ is, to me, an oxymoron). So it has been a long, long time since I’ve had to run for any sustained period of time. (Actually, I realised it would have been 14 years ago, when I last participated in team sports.) I had my doubts I would manage it, particularly because we were short several players, and did not have the option of subbing players on and off the field (unlike our opposition). This meant I not only had to run, I had to do it for the WHOLE game, which, to my mounting horror, lasts for an hour without a break.

I am therefore left with an enduring sense of mild astonishment and pride in the fact that, not only did I manage it, I can still walk today! This was such an unexpected display of health and fitness on my part, that it naturally required pizza and a couple of beers afterwards.

I will leave aside any assessment of my usefulness as a frisbee player, not to mention the fact that we didn’t win. But for a first game, with several newbies, with too few players, I think it was a very respectable, indeed a noble loss. And it’s onward and upwards for the rest of the season!

Home again, home again

2005-09-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

Well, the holiday is over and here I am again. And while I love travelling, and while I had a fantastic holiday, I still think there's no place like home.

On the other hand, there is work, and the 355 emails in my inbox...

Islands in the sun

2005-09-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

Well, it's yet another beautiful day on Koh Samui, in the Gulf of Siam.

I've been here since Monday, as a final relaxing stop before going back to work next week. (Wow, that sounds really strange.) I'm staying on Chaewang beach, which is the most developed of all Samui's beaches. That does have its down side, as the street is quite noisy and has some crappy bars, and on the beach you have to deal with people selling souvenirs (like, really, how much money do people carry in their swimmers?) On the other hand, the reason it is so well developed is that it's a nice beach, and the plus side is you are never more than a few metres from a masseusse or someone selling fresh fruit.

My hotel is quite small, but nice. Right on the beach, and surprisingly quiet given the location. Hotels here are comparatively expensive, but naturally still very cheap by Australian standards. And the room is clean, ditto the swimming pool, which is all you really need.

A lot of my time has been spent, as planned, swimming, reading, eating, and getting a couple of massages. I did however, get energetic enough to spend a day kayaking and swimming in the Angthong Marine Park, which will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Beach (which I haven't, but that's what everyone says.)

It was a really lovely day, and the islands were just stunning. We paddled underneath overhanging rocks and into a lagoon only accessible through a tunnel in the rock (a somewhat exciting process as the tide was quite high and you had to lean back to avoid hitting your head on the rocks, and the tunnel was so narrow you had to lay the paddles in the kayak and push against the sides with your hands.) We also saw the Green Lake, which is a completely enclosed salt water lake, refreshed by underground tunnels from the sea. The water was beautiful so in the afternoon we jumped off the boat to go swimming for a while before heading back to Samui.

After all that unaccustomed exercise I was a little sore, but the army of masseusses came through with a great Thai massage. I really will miss cheap massages when I go home. Traditional Thai massage is a full body experience - for the masseusse, who uses not only hands and forearms, but feet and knees, to get the right pressure in the right spot, or to pull you in several directions at once. It's very effective, but can be a little disconcerting at first, especially the audible cracking sound from my spine the first time someone knelt on the back of my thighs, put the heels of their palms in my back, and pushed. But I feel much better now :-)

So it's back to Bangkok tonight, and flying back home on Friday night. I'll see some of you soon, possibly when I get over both the sleep disturbance, and the shock of finding myself back at work.

Look Mr Frodo - an oliphant!

2005-09-13T04:31:00.000-07:00

So much for planes, trains and automobiles - today was elephants, rafts and ox-pulled carts!

I'm writing this from Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand. It has been a welcome break from the noise and chaos of Bangkok. It also gets a lot cooler here at night, which has been nice. I had originally planned to do a three or four day trek to see the hill tribes, but I realised that my time was short, so it was either see Chiang Mai, or go on a trek. So I decided to leave trekking for another day. Probably a good thing in the end as I have managed to get a nasty head cold. In Thailand. I realise a cold is an infection, and has nothing to do with whether you are actually cold, and I' ve been jammed into planes and buses with lots of people, and my resistance is probably low right now. But it still feels silly. Still, at least I don't have the more likely, but nastier, Bangkok Belly. And the advantage of being in Chiang Mai is that in addition to Western style medicine (panadol, strepils etc.), I can easily treat my cold with a variety of 'alternative' treatments - in this case liberal consumption of tom yum talay (hot and spicy seafood soup), naam manao (fresh lime juice), and massage.

Today I hopped on a mini bus for a day trip - an easy way to see a few things and meet a few people, in this case an Englishwoman and a Scottish couple, all very friendly. The day started with a visit to an elephant training villange in the mountains. They have elephants that used to work in logging, plus some younger ones born in the village. There was a baby only two weeks old - it was so cute - came running over, waving its little trunk, and rubbing its head on my legs. It may have only been two weeks old, but it still came up to my waist! We then went on a one hour elephant ride through the jungle. The trainer kept wordlessly singing something - it took me several renditions to figure out it was actually 'Take me home, country road', so I'm sure that will be in my head for days.

Then it was onto a bamboo raft for a short trip down the river. Part of the reason it was short is that the river is very high right now, and very fast moving - they had extremely bad floods here very recently. People are very nervous about the rain, because the river that runs through Chiang Mai is now only 30cm below the bank, so it will undoubtedly flood again, and last time it did a lot of damage. The rest of my trip today involved a short trip in an ox-cart to lunch, and a visit to an orchid farm. I have hired a car and driver for tomorrow so I can take a trip out to a spectacular temple on top of a nearby mountain.

I'm back in Bangkok for the weekend, then the island of Ko Samui next week. Then I'm back home after that! The holiday has gone past very quickly.

Now I'm off to enjoy another of Chiang Mai's famous attractions - the night market!

The Wedding of the Century

2005-09-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

The sun was shining, the setting was postcard perfect, friends and family had gathered from four continents, the bride was stunning, the groom was grinning like a cheshire cat, the mothers and sisters cried with happiness, speeches were made, and the drinking, dancing and singing lasted until the next day. It truly was a glorious wedding.

Greetings from sunny England

2005-08-28T02:00:00.000-07:00

No sorry, cloudy England. No, sorry, sunny again. Cloudy ... sunny ... rainy ... sunny ... whatever.

I'm writing this from Cambridge, as I'm here visiting Doug for the weekend. Those of you who know Doug will be pleased to hear that he knowingly fulfilled all our 'Doug was made for Cambridge' expectations, by meeting me at the bus station dressed in brown pinstripe pants, matching jacket, pink shirt and, despite it being Saturday, a rather spiffy matching retro tie. He said he knew I would be expecting it, but questioning of his friends confirmed my suspicions that it had absolutely nothing to do with me, and it's not at all unusual for him to dress in this manner. One of my favourite Doug quotes for the day - "Our college has what must be the smallest bar in Christendom. Damn it."

In the interests of having a proper Cambridge experience, we went punting down the Cam yesterday. Or at least, Doug did the energetic, roll up your sleeves punting thing, and I did the lounging in the punt eating strawberries thing. A job I took very seriously and performed to the best of my abilities.

Other than that, we spent the afternoon doing the tour of the other colleges, admiring buildings alternatively gracious, imposing, or hideous, and criticising the formal gardens. Naturally with Doug being a member of a college, we were able to traipse through all the colleges without paying. And of course we made a few stops along the way for some fortifying beer.

Off to visit a few more sights today, notably the King's College chapel, and I understand there is a good lunch ahead. Tomorrow it's off to Ireland, where I'm sure pre-wedding chaos will be the order of the day.

Three Days in Bangkok

2005-08-24T01:29:00.000-07:00

I always feel a bit disoriented for a little while when I arrive in a new country, and it's not just about the jet lag and lack of sleep. I think it takes a little while to get used to the stream of new impressions that hit you when you are somewhere unfamiliar. And when it comes to sensory overload, Bangkok has got a lot happening.

The heat, the humidity, the noise! I mean, everyone knows Bangkok is noisy, but the sheer scale of this has to be heard to be believed. Much of this has to do with the fact that many of the vehicles here have never even seen a muffler. Then there's the sights: glittering old temples and palaces, huge shining skyscrapers, and rusting shanty structures all jostling for the same space. Seemingly mile after mile of street stalls selling clothes, watches, shoes, weapons, Buddhist amulets, jewelry. And of course, let's not forget the smell. It would be easy to dismissively declare that Bangkok smells like too many cars and an inadequate sewerage system. Which it often does. But this doesn't take into account the other smells, which somehow, miraculously manage to drown out the background smell. Turn a corner and suddenly you are hit by the scent of fresh jasmine, or incense. Or delicious food being roasted on skewers over charcoal. (Food-on-a-stick my brother calls it, but I thought I would pass on the whole-frog-on-a-stick. I know I'm a base carnivor anyway, but I don't like my food to be recognisably something that, in its living state, would make me say 'how cute'!, as opposed to when they are chargrilled three to a skewer. But I digress, where was I?). Oh yes, and the smell of tropical fruit. Unfortunately the fruit really in season right now is durian. Widely acknowledged as the world's smelliest fruit, it looks like a large, spiky football, and has been accurately described as smelling like a teenage boy's smelly gym socks. There is a lot of it around.

Anyway, I think adding to the sense of disorientation is the language issue. I spent some time trying to learn Thai before I came here, with the upshot that I can understand on average between one-third and one-half of what is being said. Of any given sentence. Which means I get these weird, fragmentary impressions of the conversations around me. "Three of them .... From the airport .... By car ..... red ..... Not very much ... hot..." You get the idea. Anyway, this is just a brief stopover with my parents so it's mostly family time, getting some errands done etc. I'll see more of Thailand when I spend two weeks here in September.

Last night we had been doing some shopping so just had dinner in a little noodle place in a mall. On the menu was 'The Field Marshall's Noodles', which a couple of tables ordered while we were there. Not to be attempted by a group of less than four people, this monster of meal came, among other things, with a whole lobster on top, and would be delivered ceremoniously on a large wooden tray by two waiters, but not before the entire restaurant staff heralded its arrival with a very loud chant, which I'm told roughly translated as:

Here come the Field Marshall's Noodles
Worth spending your money on
They are super delicious!

It was a pretty good floor show to go along with my three dollar bowl of chicken noodles!

We've been walking a lot, which kind of broke my mother a bit. We've got a pattern of walking for as much as possible, then going into a nice hotel for a cool drink to recharge, then outside again. It's not just that the heat and humidity take it out of you. The problem is you arrive prepared with nice, comfy shoes to walk in. Then the weather makes your feet swell up and all of a sudden these great shoes are two sizes two small, and leave your feet covered in blisters, which really makes walking not much fun at all. However, I'm currently facing the world armed with a large packet of bandaids, and the occasional pause for a fresh lime juice (kind of like a non-alcoholic caprioska). Not too shabby at all.

I think I'm finally ready

2005-08-21T01:40:00.000-07:00

Given that I'm leaving the country tomorrow, I'd better be! The bag is packed, the ipod is charged, and a friend is housesitting for me. Next post will be from somewhere exciting!

I was touched by his noodly appendage

2005-08-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

There really is nothing more to add to this piece of inspired genius, so I merely present an extract, with all due respect to its creator.

OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD

I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

And just because it’s a fantastic quote:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s.

Don't rain on my parade

2005-08-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

Apparently there was massive flooding on the weekend in the north of Thailand - the worst floods in a decade. Roads are closed, people have died, others are homeless, and there is lots of damage.

Naturally, this is one of the areas I'm planning to go on my holiday. In particular, Chiang Mai came very close to declaring a state of emergency.

Not that I'm suggesting that the natural disasters that have beset Thailand lately are only a tragedy insofar as they affect my holiday plans (damn Western capitalist exploiter that I am). But I just want to learn a little more about the world, connect with the land of my birth, expand my mind, and have some fun, without worrying about flash floods, tsunamis, acts of terrorism, bird flu, international drug smugglers, or violent uprisings.

Is that too much to ask?

Only four more days of work until my holiday

2005-08-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

I have nothing else to add, just felt like saying that ;-P

Not that I'm an alcoholic or anything

2005-08-10T15:51:00.000-07:00

But there are certain situations in which the most appropriate response is the consumption of alcohol.

For example, when my brother got engaged. When my mother rang to give me the news, I was at the time conveniently sitting in a restaurant at a winery, having lunch with friends. So naturally the first thing I did was call my brother and soon-to-be-sister-in-law. The second thing I did was order a bottle of champagne. (Ok, ok, sparkling Australian wine, but you get the idea.)

Or a couple of weekends ago, when the weather was unexpectedly warm and sunny. There really was nothing to be done except play some chilled out music, and sit on the balcony in a patch of sun with a gin and tonic.

Then there was yesterday afternoon, when, by way of contrast, it snowed. It is so rare for it to snow in this city, and even rarer for the snow to stick. Yesterday's snow melted instantly everywhere except on the larger hills, but it did fall as proper snow - big, fat, fluffy looking flakes, like the exploded feather pillow of the gods. Naturally the first response of everybody in the office was to rush over to the window to say 'oooh' and 'aaah', and after a while, 'oooh' again. Except for the one hardened cynic who glanced out the window and said, 'Wow, snow. That's the most exciting thing to happen in this office since the hot air balloons the other day,' and went and sat at his desk again.

So anyway, this is all an overlong lead-up to the fact that, having driven home while it was still snowing, I really did have to sit down and have a glass of port. Particularly since I'm all out of whiskey.

Actually, speaking of alcohol, we must have known it was going to snow yesterday. We had another of our section morning teas, which are renowned in my office, mainly due to the baking skills of one of the ladies here. (She makes the largest, yummiest profiteroles you have ever seen.) So yesterday as usual we had enough food to supply a moderately sized army. But I think we really outdid ourselves when someone brought in a small, portable gas burner, and started making gluhwein. In the office. At 9.30 in the morning. (Well, she really did have to start that early, so it would be ready for morning tea time.) And we wonder why we have a reputation for decadence.

Actually no, that's a lie, we know why.

Not so exciting to do list

2005-08-08T22:49:00.000-07:00

I've been working on another 'to do' list lately, not quite so exciting as the one which had things like 'learn to tango' and 'visit New Orleans'.

This one has things like 'buy new stockings' and 'get spare keys cut' and 'check shoes are OK.'

But although the tasks themselves are incredibly mundane, the reasons behind them are extremely exciting, since in less than two weeks I will be leaving the country! For five weeks, five glorious, work-free weeks!

A brief stop in Bangkok, a long weekend in England with time to visit Doug, a couple of weeks in Ireland with the family for my brother's wedding (much happiness), then another couple of weeks in Thailand on my way home. I'm thinking family time, shopping and temples in Bangkok, up north for an eco-friendly hill-tribe trek, then some quality island time - eating, getting massaged, snorkeling, alcoholic drinks containing pineapple and coconut, repeat as necessary.

So anyway, lots of petty little tasks to take care of between now and then, but soon I will pack up and fly away.

I suspected this might be the case

2005-07-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

You are The Mad Hatter

One thing is for sure- you're as mad as a hatter.
You have an obsession with time and if tea time
were to ever cease, you would probably be even
more confused.

What Alice in Wonderland Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

It has already begun

2005-07-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

Somewhat to my surprise, I can proudly announce that I have already started on my list of things I have been meaning to do – I went skiing last weekend!

And it was great fun! Sure, I had problems with the whole stopping thing. Sure I fell over a lot. Sure I had moments of ‘What was I thinkiiiiiiiiiing!’ *crash* But it was still lots of fun. We just went up for the day, so what I really need to do is go up for a week and get a lot more lessons.

My hot tip for the week is that your friends may be very good at skiing, but that doesn’t mean they’re very good at teaching you to ski (but good effort, thanks!). Because they forget that stopping and turning are not instinctual. (Apart from the falling over technique. That usually works pretty well.) On the other hand, they are rather softer than the surrounding trees if you have no other way of slowing down. (Sorry!) The nice professional instructor will teach you things like how to stand up, and how not to slide backwards down the hill.

The other thing I did on the weekend was have a very blokey afternoon, drinking beer and playing air hockey in the garage. There is now a wooden spoon proudly engraved with my name. Or rather, ‘Big M’. (I have a nickname, I’m so proud.) And I can add to my list of new experiences being driven at high speed in a dune buggy in a suburban backyard. (I so want one. Pity I live in a third floor apartment.) My helpful tip for this activity is to remember to pull your head in (literally) when you pass within centimetres of the hills hoist, or bad things may happen.

Given that it has been a very busy, very stressful week at work, sometimes hanging out with the boys is just what you need.

Damn that Rowling woman

2005-07-17T15:57:00.000-07:00

I was low enough on sleep already.

To do list (life):

2005-07-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

- Take singing lessons
- Go to Egypt and see the pyramids
- Learn to ride a motorbike
- Go hang gliding
- Learn to cook different types of food
- Visit New Orleans
- Learn to brake, and go backwards, on rollerblades
- Do a photography course
- Learn to ski
- Write more
- Learn to tango
- Master another language...

The list goes on, but you get the general idea. What I’m thinking about is that a lot of them have been on my list for years now, and all of them are achievable. I mean, we’re not talking about plans for world domination here. (I keep those plans on a separate file, under a different name.) So maybe it’s time I went out and actually did something about it.

Sure, money will be a big thing when it comes to international travel. But this is to do in my life, not next week, so that’s OK – it will happen. And I’m going overseas for five weeks in August, so I can’t exactly complain. Time is another issue. Learning to ride a motorbike may have to wait until I have some sort of midlife crisis that manages to make my fear of death less powerful than my desire to fulfill that particular ambition. I hasten to add it’s not just other motorists or slippery roads I fear – my mother would kill me.

I should also add that my life has not exactly been a graveyard of buried dreams and fearful hesitation. I’ve actually done some deeply cool things in the last few years, including, but not limited to:
- Jumping out of a plane
- Learning kung fu
- Learning to salsa
- Living by myself
- Abseiling down underground waterfalls
- Being on television
- Traveling around Europe with a friend, and around New Zealand and the UK on my own
- Paying off all my debts, including HECS

But today my resolution is to steadily reduce the number of things about which I say – “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Honestly, is it really going to be that hard to learn how to break on rollerblades? OK, maybe it would help if I was using something other than the cheapest pair of blades I could find in Kmart when I was in high school. Which, now that I come to think of it, was quite some time ago. And maybe I’ll wait until the weather is warmer. But I’ll get there.

So far, thankfully, we're OK

2005-07-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

After a frustrating hour listening to a cool voice repeating, "The number you have dialed cannot be connected, please try again," I was immensely relieved to have confirmation that my London based brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law are fine. Ditto Douglas, Peter and Jasmine. Of course, while we're OK, there will be a lot of people who are not.

And I remembered the tsunami disaster, when I got a text message asking if all my family were OK. Since I hadn't been watching the news, I had no idea what has happening. When I replied that my family were fine and returned the question, the response was, yes, but I don't have any family there. And my immediate, horrified thought was - has there been a terrorist attack on London? I guess I was just seven months early.

Strictly DanceSport

2005-06-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

The glitz, the glamour, the fake tan... It was like a tinsel explosion in a hepatitis ward.

It was in fact the 2005 National Capital DanceSport Championships.

A friend was competing this year, so along with fellow cheer-squad members, I spent a day and night in the whole other world that is DanceSport.

It seriously was like being on the set of Strictly Ballroom. You have never seen so many orange, sparkly people in your life. Outfits that would get a person badly beaten or committed to an institution if worn anywhere else. The fixed, glazed smiles. And a gathering of diamante decorations so large, it was actually hypnotic. And people really do sit in the stands screaming "Go 241!" as if it were a football match. You could even eat a meat pie and down a VB, so it was totally Oz.

You could also buy industrial grade fake tan. (Seriously. It comes in litre bottles, labelled ‘Dance Colour’. And explains the oompa loompa orange that most modern tanning lotions try to avoid.)

The night included a special demonstration by Michael Wentink and Tebogo, “International Latin American Superstars from South Africa”. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not dissing some incredible dancing. But the funniest thing was the multiple costume changes, which necessitated some portentous voiceover fillers in between dance styles. So we learned about the lovely Tebogo, who despite being “smaller than the tsetse fly” nonetheless moved like, well I can’t remember exactly, but let’s just say that she moved like the wind over the harsh African savannah, and you get the general idea. Michael, on the other hand, apparently possesses the “strength of the cheetah, the speed of the lightening.” Or was it the other way around?

I was also a little disturbed by the junior competitors, aged 13 to 16 (and some of them were very small), competing with pelvic-grinding intensity in the Latin numbers. And the announcers insisting on introductory remarks like, “and now, the sensual rhumba!” Like, no! No sensuality for 13 year olds! Certainly none of the girls would be allowed to go to a disco in outfits as revealing as their competition gear.

But anyway, certainly a whole new experience for me, and some fantastic dancing, including by my friend. And you’ve got to admire the dedication of people willing to undergo the training, the mockery, and the thousands of dollars it costs to put together a decent competition outfit.

Aaaaww

2005-06-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

I quite like my new little avatar - I think it's cute. I couldn't get the hair colour right, but then again in terms of accuracy it's the least of my problems. But where would we be without people like this to put handy little tools on the internet.

My latest gadget purchase is a funky HP laptop, which is very exciting. I've just been playing around with it so far. But if I ever get around to getting an ISP I might actually post more often. On the other hand, maybe I should just make sure I still get out of the house on a regular basis.

They're after me

2005-05-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

A Chinese-born Australian citizen was detained by immigration officials and held at Sydney's Villawood detention centre for three days, despite telling them his passport was at home.

A civil case has been filed in the New South Wales Supreme Court.

The man showed the officials a valid driver's licence, Medicare card and proof of employment, but did not have his passport on him at the time.

He was freed only after a lawyer took his passport to the Immigration Department.

The Immigration Department says it cannot comment on the matter.

ABC Online

I don’t want to sound melodramatic or alarmist about this, but the more these sorts of stories emerge, the more I get worried and depressed about the kind of country I live in.

Due to the court action there are no details on this particular case, so it leaves you with the obvious question – on what pretext was this man detained? Maybe if I was living in a poor Indigenous community I wouldn’t be so surprised that a man could be detained just because of what he looks like, but coming as I do from a comfortably middle class family, in a predominantly middle class, anglo city like Canberra, I struggle with the thought.

And it leaves me uncomfortably imagining my mother one day ringing to tell me my father is missing. Right, well you check the hospitals, I’ll check the immigration detention centres. What’s happening to us?

And I’ve always found the whole notion of racial profiling to be particularly bizarre (I mean, apart from the obvious), because my own appearance apparently defies easy classification. Dark hair, olive skin, short stature, round eyes and face. I’ve been mistaken for just about any ethnicity you could care to mention. People who only know my first name often assume me to be Sicilian, or Spanish. People who know my surname assume I’m part Indian or Sri Lankan. But lots of people try to guess where I’m from based on reasons as various as their own ethnicity, the social context, my clothes and jewellery, my tattoo… So I’ve been asked if I’m Australian Aboriginal, Maori, almost any South American nationality, Greek, Lebanese, Hungarian… Add to this the fact that I tend to unconsciously adopt the accent of whoever it is I’m talking to, and I could be from ANYWHERE. Canadians are often convinced I must be Canadian, due to my incredibly strong accent - an accent that disappears when they do. (And for anyone wandering across this site who doesn’t know me, I will add that none of the above guesses are correct.)

I kind of like being an international woman of mystery – keep them guessing. Even if every now and then you come across someone who thinks that makes you a mongrel. (The comparison to dog breeding was particularly lovely. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mother get so mad about a news story.) But maybe, in this alert and alarmed Australia, I should be more careful. After all, I certainly don’t carry my passport on me – who does? So if you don’t hear from me for a while, you might want to check Villawood. Either that or I’ve just given up and moved to New Zealand, where mixed-race people don’t perturb them and their immigration detention facilities are a lot nicer.

Lessons learned, weekend 16-17 April

2005-04-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

Scenario:
A friend has invited you to join her evening of fun with friends of hers you don’t know. They are going on the Moonlight Bus, a double-decker bus that takes you around pubs and clubs, with free alcohol on the bus and cheap alcohol at all venues.

Important tips:
1. Face it Marissa, you are far too old for the Moonlight Bus.
2. See point 1.
3. Re. points 1 and 2, 18-year-old guys now look to you as if they are 12.
4. Re. point 3, you probably won’t feel sexy in a Demi Moore kind of a way when one of these pre-pubescent Casanovas stumbles, stares, and mumbles, “you’re a really hot chick”.
5. When a spilled drink causes you to slip over on the dance floor, slamming both shins into the floor and causing considerable and lasting bruising, your companions are by this time too drunk to notice that you are kneeling in stale beer with tears of pain streaming down your face. This is a bit depressing.
6. If attempting to address points 1 through 5 with the excessive consumption of alcohol, be prepared to wake up the next morning to the consequences of some fairly uncharacteristic behaviour.
7. See point 1.

Lessons learned, weekend 9-10 April

2005-04-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

Scenario:
A work friend has invited you to spend the weekend in a NSW town with friends of hers and her husband. Let’s face it, they’re setting you up.

Important questions to ask first:
1. Is the fact you are being set up known by, not only the guy in question, but all the other guys there?
2. Will the day’s drinking commence at 10 am?
3. Will the weekend’s activities consist of spending seven hours (no exaggeration) in the RSL, drinking continuously and betting on horses?
4. Will another guy in the group think it appropriate to compliment your ‘nice pair’ and repeatedly invite you to “get nuuuude”?
5. Will the guy you are being set up with be so traumatised by your friend’s husband announcing to the group, despite the fact that you've barely spoken to each other, that the two of you “are gonna go home, they’re gonna go home, an’ make love, ‘s gonna be beau’ful”, that he stays as far away from you as possible?
6. Will a drunk, fat, hairy man wearing only a tiny pair of red jocks make repeated attempts to get into your bedroom to find somewhere to sleep?
7. Will the group, having ceased drinking at around 5.30 am, commence drinking again at 9 am?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, DON’T GO!

The daily grind

2005-03-30T23:22:00.000-08:00

One week off work sick was all it took to get me out of the routine of a normal working day - they just seem so long! Either that or I'm not 100% better, so more inclined to be tired and grumpy by the end of the day.

On the plus side, I've been told that my currently deeper and huskier voice (thanks to the medication) makes this a perfect time to cut a jazz album. So that's OK.

Being at home sick naturally meant lots of movie watching (I picked up the collector's edition of Labyrinth, yay!). It also (possibly just a different kind of sickness) meant lots of cleaning and rearranging my house - new picture frames, moving things in the kitchen etc. My one bedroom apartment is actually quite a reasonable size, but a week in which I didn't go anywhere certainly gave me a lot of time to notice everything about it, including things that were dusty or could be arranged better. It's sad, I know.

On the other hand, the house looks great!

Whiskers on kittens

2005-03-15T20:36:00.000-08:00

Guns, drugs, cash and an ornamental cat collection were stolen in the house robbery at Campania, north of Hobart, on Saturday, Hobart Magistrates' Court heard.

This sentence wins my award for most amusing news report of the day.

For those out of the loop, after stealing the above diverse items, a couple holed up in a suburban home and kept police at bay for three days, during time which they fired shots and threatened to detonate a bomb.

I just love the mental picture this brings to mind: Look, you can take the semi-automatics, they’re yours. The smack? Fine, fine, I’ve been trying to quit anyway. Have a suitcase full of money while you’re at it. But for the love of god! Just leave the Franklin Mint collection! Do you realise how much time I had to spend on eBay to get that collection? Have you no soul?

Tales of the city

2005-02-20T18:05:00.000-08:00

I swear there is somebody living in the carpark of my apartment building.

The other day I got up early to go to the gym before work (quite an effort I assure you). So I left home at about 6.45am. There was a guy sleeping in the front seat of the car next to mine. The car parks are all designated to particular apartments. There is rarely a car there, but when there is, it's the same one this guy was sleeping in.

Then, a few days later, I went down to the car park in the afternoon. The same guy was sitting in the car, just listening to the radio. The engine wasn't running, he didn't seem to have just gotten back or just about to leave. He was just hanging out in his car. Listening to the radio. In the basement carpark.

Weird.

Home again

2005-02-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

Back to normal life again after a self-indulgent week in Perth and Broome. Amazingly, the long flight home was not sufficient to drain my carefully nurtured relaxation. It was great to get away, even just for a week, to do something for myself. I was becoming aware lately that I had been getting too tense, too prone to get irritated or angered by situations I would normally shrug off. And not because of anything big but just because sometimes that low level tension just accumulates. So last week was all about letting it go.

I spent a couple of nights in Perth, where I explored the city on foot and took a train to Fremantle. I also caught a ferry to Rottnest Island and hired a bike - a fantastic day riding along the coast and finding a beautiful beach to go swimming. And quokkas, of course. It made up for the fact that my hotel just sucked (they put me in a smoking area, there was a cigarette burn on the toilet seat, bleh).

Anyway, the resort in Broome was just beautiful, not the sort of place I usually treat myself to so that was nice. Right on Cable Beach, the place was decorated in an Asian theme, picking up on Broome's history of Asian pearl divers. I spent my evenings watching the sun set over the beach while I had my dinner.

I tried not to do too much as usually I tire myself out on holidays trying to see everything. I did go on a half day guided tour of Broome, which was fantastic as I learnt all about the history of the place and how it has changed. I also got to see a lot more of the town and surrounding area, since for a small town it is quite spread out. It is kind of bizarre to wander into a small corrugated iron shed, to find it beautifully decorated on the inside, and offering astonishing pearls for sale, one I saw being so large that the single pearl cost $750,000.

Anyway, mostly I walked on the beach, went swimming, read books and generally chilled out. I treated myself to a birthday massage and facial (just in case I wasn't quite relaxed enough) and went on a camel ride on the beach at sunset. An incredibly touristy thing to do, but quite spectacular to be high up on a large animal that walks with a rocking-chair gait, watching the sun set over the water. Life is good.

So, back at home and back at work. The workmates had organised a birthday lunch today and the neighbours are organising birthday dinner tomorrow, so it has certainly been a very welcoming homecoming. So I think I'll be able to hold onto that feeling of calm for at least a little while longer.

Counting down the days

2005-02-01T18:15:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy few weeks. In between work (which now that people are back from holiday has actually picked up), general socialising, and facing a few personal challenges (including rock climbing and karaoke), there’s been a lot happening. I also continue to play house with my apartment, so I had some photos enlarged and finally got around to putting them up the other day.

Next week I’m actually on holiday (yay!), which will be fantastic. After all the frantic pace of the last couple of months my aim for the week is to spend it on the beach or in a pool with a book and a cold drink. I'll be away on my birthday so I'm planning for a bit of extra indulgence on that day, maybe a massage or a facial. Of course, I’m going a long way to fulfil this deceptively simple ambition (Broome, with a few nights in Perth), but I figure if you are going to spend all your time on a beach, it may as well be the beautiful Cable Beach. Actually it started out a simple plan but just kept getting more complicated. I’ve never been to WA so I am really looking forward to it. Unfortunately my flight home has been screwed by timetable changes, so getting home will be an all day epic. Just hoping I can hang on to some of that sense of tranquillity. Someone suggested books on tape, but I’m just hoping the alcohol on the plane is free.

It's all about the passion

2005-01-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

Ever since a friend’s party on Saturday (fun party by the way, thanks!) I’ve had this niggling doubt about a question someone asked me that night. As an alternative to the usual, ‘so what do you do?’, someone I was introduced to asked me what I was passionate about. Or alternately, if the host were asked to describe or define me, what would I want her to say?

And I just don’t know.

The question was phrased to avoid the assumption that a person defines themselves by their job, which I think is good. For some people their job is a key part of their identity, but I really don’t think the fact that I’m a public servant gives you a key indicator as to who I am as a person. I really hope not. I mean, I enjoy my job, I think there’s meaning in what I do, but it’s not who I am.

Who am I? I’ll be 28 next month and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. Does anyone?

I don’t have an activity outside of work I’m particularly passionate about. I’m not writing a novel, or working with the homeless, or learning how to hang-glide. I’m enjoying learning Latin dancing, I do a lot of things I think are fun, but I don’t have a burning passion for one particular thing.

I don’t know if this should disturb me. Does a person need to do something that defines them? If you asked me what I wanted to be doing with my weekend I would probably say ‘spending time with my friends’. Is that a bit aimless? Or maybe it just means that what I’m really passionate about are my friends and family. And if what defines us is the way we interact with other people, maybe that’s OK.

Week Ending Sunday 9 January

2005-01-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Alcohol free days: 0
Times dinner eaten at home: 1
Items of clothing bought: 5

I must be stopped.

And you are?

2005-01-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

Celebrity endorsements of major causes can range from the sublime to the ridiculous. On the plus side I think it's great when celebrities donate big money to charity, and some can be quite effective at raising awareness or campaigning for attitude change in certain groups for whom they have influence. On the other hand, sometimes there is a good laugh to be had in famous people grossly overestimating their own influence.

Mr President, I think it’s time we brought the troops home. Really, why? It seems we’ve had a special request from Madonna. I mean, millions of people around the world marched against war, but if Madonna says it’s bad...

I was rather bemused the other day to read that Richard Gere has appeared in advertisements urging Palestinians to vote. Apparently the man is “a known supporter of the Palestinian people” and “believes that freedom and liberty are for everyone.” Which is all very well, but I doubt if the Palestinians would know that. I'm guessing that the local Gaza cinema hasn't had a Pretty Woman festival lately.

As it turns out, the ads actually are just confusing to your average Palestinan voter. Some actor I’ve never heard of, an American, is telling me to vote. And I should care? So my favourite quote of the day goes to Gaza soap factory worker Manar al-Najjar:

We don't need the Americans’ intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them - they elected a moron.

Indeed.

I'm sorry, where were we?

2005-01-05T19:20:00.000-08:00

OK, so that couple of weeks break from blogging turned into a year and a half. Whoops. Easily distracted I guess.

I decided to restart the blog due to the disturbing realisation that, with so many friends interstate or overseas, this is actually one of the easiest ways to communicate with people. Certainly I'm not always the best at emailing or phoning (let alone writing), but I do regularly check friends' blogs. So I surrender myself to the technology. This being a stunningly unproductive work period (we just spent the morning rearranging all the desks in our section), I finally had time to do something about it.

In the meantime I have just been enjoying a thoroughly self-indulgent summer, in my new bachelorette pad. I certainly have a busier social life living on my own than I did when living with friends - because I actually have to leave the house to talk to someone I like. I've had to greatly increase my weekly drinking and eating out budget, and have to make sure I don't buy too much perishable food, because I'm not there to eat it. That being said, life will probably calm down a little now that we are heading back to work and a slightly greater degree of respectability.

So anyway, a new year, a new home, a new look for the blog. Drop in and see me sometime.

I'm not here right now. Leave a message after the beep.

2003-06-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

My apologies to my small but select reading public, but I'm going to take a break from Ruminating for a week or two. Life has been extremely busy lately and I just haven't had time to write anything. I figure I have enough stress right now without voluntarily adding to it. I will make a reappearance when things calm down a bit.

It's all relative

2003-06-11T16:51:00.000-07:00

My experience of the passage of time seems to be slightly problematic at the moment.

To quote the memorable excuse of a friend of mine, I appear to have passed through a freak wormhole.

This morning after breakfast I looked at the clock and it was 8.17am. I brushed my teeth, put on my shoes, and looked at the clock again. It said 8.40am.

I suppose that twenty minutes of my life was not too much to miss, but on the other hand I am unlikely to get it back in a hurry. And I like the part of the morning that comes after you’re properly awake and before you have to run out the door. It is an important time for preparing yourself to face the day ahead. Maybe I’ll just keep missing so many twenty minute segments that it will end up adding up to something significant. Or maybe the universe is just compensating for the fact that this working week seems to be dragging like treacle.

Unfortunately, my boss is not scientifically minded or inclined to watch too many special-effects laden movies, so she is unlikely to be impressed by my pleading disturbances in the space-time continuum as an excuse for being late.

On the other hand she has admitted to enjoying some mind-altering substances in her younger and wilder days, so maybe I can convince her that she only THINKS I was late.

Happiness

2003-06-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite things in the world is spontaneous happiness. All of a sudden, for no particular reason, you just find yourself grinning. The other day I woke up feeling like that, and the first thought that struck me was ‘I am incredibly lucky.’

Above my bed is a set of shelves where I keep photographs and mementos. I woke up and looked at the photos – of me standing near a waterfall in Tasmania; surrounded by close friends at my 21st birthday party; with my parents and brother, all of us healthy and happy. Further on was a whole collection of photographs of my friends – I could remember when all the pictures were taken. I looked at the other things on the shelf – keepsakes given to me for birthdays, Christmas, Valentines Day. I saw the little stone gargoyle that I bought from a cart near Notre Dame. I remembered climbing to the top of the cathedral to see the real gargoyles, and the contrast between them and modern Paris below. I remembered how the setting sun made the cold, grey stone glow honey-coloured. Hanging off the shelf in the corner was the royal flag of Scotland, lion rampant. I remembered that I bought it on the Isle of Skye. The mist curled around the rocks, the castle, the boats in the harbour. I remembered startlingly sunny days in the highlands, sitting in the heather, drinking single-malt whiskey.

Looking around the room I saw the wooden box where I store other keepsakes. Bundles of letters from friends as they traveled after we left school. Cards given on special occasions, old love letters, sketches by friends with a talent for drawing. When I went to find some earrings to wear, I thought about the other jewelry I own. None of it is amazingly valuable, but a lot of it has meaning. A jade pendant from New Zealand, its design signifying strength, and safe journey over water. A necklace given by my parents on my 18th birthday, and another given by a group of friends on my 21st. The small, pearl necklace that was given to my grandmother on her 21st birthday.

It was an incredible feeling that I have been trying to hang onto ever since – to look around and see all the everyday items in my house imbued with special meaning. I think I have been more inclined lately to spontaneous, unreasoning grumpiness, so it was a nice change. What made me feel so privileged was not the material possessions themselves (although as a middle-class Australian I am doing way better than most of the world’s population in that regard) but that so much of it had special associations with people and places. So I am sitting at my desk, glancing at a photograph of my family, thinking of the friends who may end up reading this, thankful to have them in my life.

Crikey! Getta loada paradise!

2003-06-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

While I realise that religious institutions often feel pressure to respond to the changing needs of the community in order to remain relevant, I somehow doubt that the Boofhead Bible is going lead to the revitalization of Christianity in Australia. Ken Richards’ Aussie Bible includes bushrangers, reference to the three eggheads, and Jesus calling people ‘boofheads’. The Bible Society of NSW has backed the project, apparently in an attempt to attract new readers. As far as I can tell that means they are selling to those people who believe all Australians speak like Steve Irwin, so it will probably sell very well in the USA. On the other hand I don’t think there is any great shortage of people reading the bible over there.

Naturally, the quest to make knowledge more accessible and popular with the masses is not new. I was personally very impressed the day I stumbled upon Britney’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics, in which the pop princess sexily dispenses such wisdom as In compound semiconductors, the difference in electro-negativity leads to a combination of covalent and ionic bounding. Doesn’t turn you on? How about The expression of the effective mass is found from the dynamics of a wave-packet, which represents a localised particle. Hell, I’d rather listen to Britney say that than Hit me baby, one more time.

And on a personal level, the exciting news is that I have been asked in for a job interview. Looks like the time I spent slaving over the selection criteria paid off. I really hate writing job applications, although I have been told I do them well. I also got some help and advice from a few people, so if I do get the job there will be a few people to buy beers for. I’ve got a bit of work to do before the interview, like reading annual reports and other exciting documentation and picking up on organisational buzz words. I also have some shopping to do – acquire some stockings without holes in, maybe a handbag that costs more than $25. Or at least one that looks as though it cost more than $25. I also have to tell the boss I have an interview, ask for an afternoon off so I can go to the interview, and ask for a reference from my supervisor. There is always such a lot of crap to do before going to an interview, that I always feel cheated if I don’t get the job.

Road Trip!

2003-06-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I survived it. A weekend road-trip to Sydney with three lads, all of us squashed into my little two-door hatchback. (Well, according to the manufacturers it is three-door, but I don’t see the point of classifying the boot as a door.)

There were moments of excitement – having to swerve around a car that suddenly stopped, narrowly missing the car in the next lane; watching the fuel gauge sit on empty while noting that we remembered the first petrol station on the highway as being nearer to Sydney – but overall pretty free from incident.

I was staying with a friend in Sydney, and it was lovely to catch up. We had a completely decadent lunch at the Park Hyatt, overlooking the harbour (I’ll have the smoked Tasmanian salmon as an entrée, thank you . . .). On Saturday night it was off to a friend’s party, where I got to catch up not only with the birthday girl but also with a few other great people I haven’t seen for a while.

Of course, no road trip can be free of a good trauma story, and mine happened on Saturday night. The party I went to was in Balmain, the apartment where I was staying in Woolloomooloo. The owner of the apartment was not there that night, so I was spared from the guilt of stumbling home at a godforsaken hour and waking her up. I got ready for the party on Saturday evening and conscientiously locked the door behind me when I left.

When I got back to the apartment at 1.15am I couldn’t get back in again. I had a whole handful of keys, but none of them fitted one of the main locks on the door. This took me some time to determine, as I wasn’t entirely sure if my problems were all due to the fact that I was very tired and somewhat drunk. I eventually had to ring the poor girl at 1.30 to determine that no, I really didn’t have the key. Because she had never been given it. There are times when things just seem too hard, and you wish you could just curl up in a ball where you are, close your eyes and make it all go away. Standing there in the corridor of her apartment building in the small hours was one of those times. I ended up having to go back to Balmain like a homeless waif, and claim a spot on the sofa. Many thanks for the loan of a t-shirt to sleep in, and to the housemate who gifted me with a brand new toothbrush.

Between one thing and another, it was 5.30 on Sunday evening before I managed to get into her apartment to claim my possessions, not the least of which being some deodorant and clean underwear.

I suppose that if nothing else it was an exercise in appreciating the small things in life – clean teeth, clean clothes, having my glasses. These things make all the difference. And it was certainly not as bad as my last Sydney-road-trip-trauma, in which I got very, very lost trying to come home. So I think I’m on an upward swing – give me a few more road-trips and everything will be flawless. But then I’ll be forced to invent a good story to tell.

The other thing we did on the weekend was go and see Secretary - which I definitely recommend. Despite concerning itself with a sado-masochistic relationship it is not seedy and exploitative. It is actually a love story with a difference, and an interesting look at the complexities of human relationships. Maggie Gyllenhaal is wonderful as the secretary in question – very convincing as a woman predisposed to self-harm, who finds new confidence and fulfillment in an unorthodox relationship. James Spader continues his career as the slightly eerie character with unorthodox sexual tendencies (anyone ever see Crash?) but he does it very well. Secretary was enjoyable, thought provoking, and surprisingly sweet. And that's my two cents.

Strange Fruit

2003-05-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

A slow start to the morning today, after a late night at Tilley's. For non-Canberrans, Tilley's Divine Cafe & Gallery is a Canberra landmark and favourite performance venue, like many Canberra features hidden away in one of the suburbs. Low-ceilinged, red-painted, and full of dark, scarred wooden furniture, Tilley's was famous for once being open only to women. Although that is no longer the case, the clientele does still disproportionately consist of short-haired women in Birkenstocks. (Not that I say that as a criticism. Some of my best friends are short-haired women in Birkenstocks. Let’s be honest, a lot of them are. In fact, were I not too cheap to buy Birkenstocks, I would be too.) Tilley’s is a great concert venue (most performers I have seen make a point of saying how much they love performing there and how lucky Canberrans are to have it), and being in the suburbs I am always surprised that noise complaints haven't shut them down. I have seen some great acts at Tilley's - The Waifs, Tex Perkins, Vince Jones, and last night, Fruit.

Fruit is an Australian band, consisting of three lead singers/musicians (Sam Lohs and Susie Keynes on acoustic and electric guitar and Mel Watson on saxaphone, clarinet, flute, trumpet, horn and whatever other instrument she can get her hands on), Brian Ruiz on bass and Yanya Boston on drums. The core of the band has been together since 1995, which is quite an amazing feat as they are all incredible performers in their own right (each has released solo albums) as well as obviously being strong-minded women. They all have very different voices, but the sounds compliment each other and their harmonies are to die for. A little bit jazz, a little bit blues, a little bit funk, a little bit rock, and a whole lot of energy. Grinning madly from ear to ear and jumping up and down from the sheer joy of performance. One of my favourite live acts, and if you are in Sydney, do yourself a favour and go see them at The Basement tonight.

I am still driven to teeth-gritting feelings of impotent rage at selfish bitches who insist on talking loudly throughout a performance, but fortunately Fruit has such a big sound that most of the time they safely drown out such irritations.

Other than that I am looking forward to a Sydney road-trip this weekend, and contemplating the rash promise I made to go indoor rock-climbing next week. Not that the idea of rock-climbing disturbs me – I’m not afraid of heights and it looks like fun. I am disturbed that apparently the venue has a sign, placed inside the toilets where you don’t see it until far too late, notifying patrons that they don’t have insurance. Maybe it is meant to encourage climbers to put that much more effort into not falling.

And Mother Holle likers her wool from the African dromedary

2003-05-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

Life is full of little disappointments, and last night’s Eurovision Song Contest was no exception.

I’ve grown quite fond of Eurovision in the last couple of years. A chance to get together, get drunk, and spend some quality time laughing uproariously at some of the worst music and worst costuming choices to come out of Europe since the invention of lederhosen.

The first problem that arose last night was my fellow audience members. Or the lack of them. It is bad enough being the only one in my household not getting some regular good lovin’ – must they rub it in my face by failing to come home on such a regular basis?

So I had one other person to watch Eurovision with, and his heart wasn’t really in it. Besides which, he doesn’t drink. I respect that, but the problem is that Eurovision is best watched while drunk, and getting drunker. And getting drunk by yourself just smacks of sadness and incipient alcoholism, which means I was sober too.

I still managed to burn the popcorn.

Then there was the commentary. I’m normally a fan of SBS’s Des Mangan, who brings his own brand of impish perversity to a Monday night movie. Unfortunately he confined himself to commenting in-between the songs, and the last thing you want to do in Eurovision is actually listen to the music.

The British commentary used to screen in Australia, courtesy of Terry Wogan. Terry used to comment all through every performance, and as the evening progressed he would get increasingly drunk and increasingly bitter. By the time it got to the voting at the end of the night, Terry would have worked his way up to a state of outrage over the habit of neighbouring or allied countries to vote for each other. Because preserving the integrity of the Eurovision voting process is vital. Des was just altogether too respectful to be fun. However I have found that the British version will be screened on SBS at 12.30 on 31 May.

To really understand the essence of the Eurovision Song Contest, and why drunkenness is an integral part of the experience, you have to understand the music. To which end, I bring you the lyrics of Austria’s Alf Poier. Please note that Alf looked and sounded like a guest star on The Wiggles. He also came sixth.

Man is the measure of all things

I like most animals on this earth
But I really prefer little rabbits and bears

Soon all birds and beetles will die
But Adam's in bed with Eve busy reproducing

Rabbits live in the woods
Cats in the meadows
And cockroaches
Live under tiles

Little rabbits have short noses
And kittens soft paws
And Mother Holle likes her wool
From the African dromedary

The difference between animals such as apes and primates
Is no bigger than between noodles and pasta

But whoever wants to know more about animals should study Biology or inform
himself on my homepage

Some animals have wings
And others have fins
Some live outdoors
And others in cans

Small rabbits . . .

Music can touch your heart and change your life. Or so I'm told.

Where are they now?

2003-05-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Over the last week or so I have had the chance to catch up with a couple of people I haven't spoken to for a while. Inevitably, such conversations always include updates on the lives of mutual friends and acquaintances. It is starting to freak me out.

It is only in the last couple of years that a lot of friends from school and university started moving away. I went straight from school to university to full-time work, all in the same city and without a break. This means that I was working a few years before many of my friends, who were either doing far more academically impressive things than I did, or were too busy dealing with whatever life threw at them, both good and bad, to give all their attention to the minor problem of graduating from university.

Over the past couple of years, however, even the most determined of perpetual students has left, either because they ran out of things to study, ran out of money, or ran out of the time in which it permissible to complete a degree. The only students among my friends now are those who have gone back to do incredibly grown up things, like their Masters or Doctorate.

So people started to scatter more lately, following jobs, or people, or lifestyles. And while in one way school and university are like another world now, in some ways the time has sped by. So the where are they now? conversations are both hilarious and quite frightening.

You remember A? She's getting married next month. I'm one of the bridesmaids. What happened to G? Oh, he's a teacher now. Can you imagine him molding the minds of small children? Hey, did you hear that Q and M got together? How the hell does that work? Last time I heard about Y he was in a southeast Asian gaol. Wonder if he's still there. What about D? Oh she's in Sydney, got some incredibly high-powered job now. You mean L and Z are still a couple? Who would have thought that would last? No, R is taking time off to concentrate on being a dancer.

In the case of some people, you could kind of see it coming a mile away. For others their life has taken a completely different turn. Sometimes I wonder how it all happened. You live there doing that, and I live here doing this. But every few months, or every few years, we can still get together and have a few beers and it's like no time passed at all.

I like that.

Well, the good news for this morning is that I am not going blind

2003-05-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

I had to go to the ophthalmic surgeon this morning to get my eyes checked out. I was experiencing some strange heat-haze vision the other day, plus I've had a few headaches. Apparently it was an ocular migraine. I did not realise that migraines come in all shapes and sizes, and don't necessary include the feeling that your head is splitting open. So that's OK.

Of course the doctor had to put drops in my eyes to make my pupils dilate, so right now I look like I've been hitting the belladonna in a big way, and the light from my computer screen is making me squint. On the plus side, dilated pupils are supposed to make you sexier, which is why people used to use belladonna in the first place.

The experience has left me pondering again the unreliability of our senses. I've been seeing things that aren't there - wavy lines, moving specks of light, that sort of thing. I've heard things that aren't there - a ringing in the ears, the belief that someone just said my name. Touch? What about that creepy feeling upon seeing spiders or ants, as if they are crawling on your skin. A sudden, inexplicable shiver. A feeling of physical pain caused by emotional distress. And all of this falls into normal, everyday experience, without getting into the territory of true hallucinations and delusions. So what do you rely on if you can't rely on your own senses? What is The Matrix?

Socially Awkward Moments of Our Time #387

2003-05-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

Being on a date with someone who is obviously WAY more excited to be on a date with you than you are about being on a date with them. And he was such a nice guy. I feel kinda bad.

Tales of compulsive capitalism

2003-05-13T16:17:00.000-07:00

We got a new appliance in our household yesterday, and I'm very excited.

Actually we tend to get new gadgets in our house fairly often, and almost all of them are mine. I used to think of myself as a careful saver (otherwise known as tight-arse), but then I realised that I am just selective about what I think is worth buying. I don't like going clothes shopping, for example, because I tend to think everything is vastly overpriced. On the other hand I am a woman who just decided one day to buy a DVD player. And surround sound system. And then I needed a new television (well, particularly after my housemate’s ancient television had a heart attack and died from the strain of having a new gadget attached to it). And then there was the VCR. And the MiniDisk player. And new speakers.

You get the picture.

So anyway, new appliance yesterday. I'm so excited by it that I am going to go home at lunch today so that I can use it. It is just what our household needed, particularly at this time of year. I can't believe we didn't get one long ago.

Thank god for the sandwich toaster.

The sins of the office

2003-05-11T16:25:00.000-07:00

I opened my e-mail this morning and started thinking about the many sins of the office. I'm not talking about the big ones, like sexual harassment or embezzlement. I mean those little things that drive everybody crazy but which happen every day. In this case it was the person who decides to hit 'reply all' to an all-staff e-mail. Although there are only a dozen people in the Canberra office of my organisation, there are thousands of staff members around the world, all on the same e-mail system. So every time there is an all-staff e-mail you are sure to get flooded with replies from people you have never heard of, talking to someone else you have never heard of. What is worse is when people have set the automated reply function to 'reply all'. Thousands of people then get an e-mail from somebody in an obscure corner of the globe saying, 'I am on leave right now. Please contact . . .' Sometimes a whole chain reaction of auto responses is set off.

Among the many other office sins committed daily is included:
- Using ALL CAPS in e-mail. Because everyone loves being shouted at.
- Using the last of the milk and not replacing it.
- Stealing a colleague’s tea or coffee stash.
- Using a colleague's special coffee cup.
- Stealing a colleague's pen. The one that doesn't leave ink blots and hasn't been chewed in frustration.
- Taking credit for somebody else's work.
- Taking all the chocolate biscuits and leaving the boring ones for everybody else.
- Volunteering someone else for all the really shit jobs.
- Inflicting holiday/baby photos on clearly uninterested and busy colleagues.
- Having loud personal phone calls, particularly involving lurid or suggestive material.

There are many others of course, and some people seem to invent new ones every day. Now we just need a vengeful office god to smite sinners for such crimes against colleagues. (And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger . . .) Because without consequences, people just don’t learn. I may just have a calling to be the instrument of retribution.

Office Space

2003-05-07T16:57:00.000-07:00

Starting full time work is one of those great milestones in life which always involves a great deal of fear and doubt. I was 22 when I first started working in an office, four years ago. There was so much I felt I didn't know, from basic office procedure to the higher functions of my job. Aside from the interns (who were all at least 2 years older than me) I was the youngest person in the office by 15 years. Several of my co-workers had children substantially older than I was.

I quickly learned, however, that there are two things I possess which gave me a huge advantage over many people already well established in the workforce. The first is a degree of common sense. The second is the ability to remain, at least outwardly, very calm. These two things will get you a long way, and their absence is both noticeable and highly irritating in others. It would seem that common sense it not actually all that common.

Yesterday I was unfortunate enough to be witness to an argument between two work colleagues which turned into a full-blown girly hissy fit. Hair pulling was narrowly avoided. The interaction between these two intelligent, senior women, both in their early forties, essentially boiled down to You are such a bitch. Well, you started it. I'm going home. It actually degenerated to the point where one of them stood up with tears in her eyes and announced she was leaving. Fortunately around that point some sort of gross stupidity alarm must have gone off, and they both backed down. But I'll never be able to look at either of them the same way again.

The entire incident has probably made even more attractive a startling piece of information I was given last night. It seems that someone wants me to apply for a job within the organisation they head. Quite a senior position, and for considerably more money than I receive now. The really strange part about this is that their desire to employ me is based almost entirely on a dinner party conversation four years ago. Whatever it was that our table started talking about, I apparently argued my point in a manner that was intelligent, articulate and convincing. I have absolutely no idea what the hell the conversation might have been about.

Whether or not any of this ever comes to anything, it is of course highly flattering that someone remembers me from so long ago and would like to give me lots of money. It has also given me the key to success in future job interviews that may come my way.

Obviously, I just need to drink more.

These things I have learned

2003-05-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

Back in Canberra again after my little work jaunt. Actually I got back on Friday but have been far too busy to go near my blog. I’m covering someone else’s job while he is away for two months, so I have had two jobs worth of crap piling up while I was away. When this guy gets back from holiday I am going to torture him slowly.

I have also been busy celebrating my housemate’s graduation, catching up with friends and family, and going to see

2003-04-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

If you don't hear from me for a couple of weeks . . .

One good thing about my mixed racial heritage is that I retain, to a greater or lesser degree, a year-round tan. This tends to create the impression that I spend a healthy amount of time outside in the fresh air, which is not always the case.

The drawback is that when I am sick (as I am now), I'm not really setup to go pale. Instead I tend to turn this strange, unappealing yellow colour, faintly tinged with green. This also makes my freckles stand out in startling contrast to my skin. Add the watery eyes and reddened nose of the flu, and you will understand that I do not look my best right now. People at work keep asking me if I am OK and why I am yellow. So far I have resisted the urge to mess with their heads by bursting into tears and accusing them all of being racists.

Being ill is never much fun, but I am particularly unimpressed with the timing of this bout. On Saturday I am going overseas on a work trip. This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, being ill when you have no choice but to be at work is just tiring and depressing. Secondly, travelling when you are ill sucks, particularly when you travel by plane and are experiencing sinus problems. There is that lovely sensation as the pressure in your sinuses tries to equalise with the cabin pressure, and you think your face is going to explode. Thirdly, I am going to an Asian country, and having the flu when it is 30 degrees outside always feels like you are being cheated somehow.

All of this pales in comparison with the real problem with travelling to an Asian country right now - SARS. I'm not really concerned about getting it (although the mutated, intestine-eating variety sounds pretty alarming) but I have a vision of myself getting hauled aside at an airport and accused of having it. Of course, if they decided to quarantine me in the swanky hotel in which I am going to stay I suppose I could live with that, but somehow I don't think that is how it works. Actually I am more worried about getting quarantined when I come back home.

So you won't hear from me for a week while I am at this conference, but if my absence stretches longer than that you will know I am trapped in a hospital somewhere, like something from a B-grade horror movie. Bring on the zombies!

2003-04-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

Why I want to live in a menage a trois with Ben Harper and Jack Johnson

Back at work again after the Easter break, and in the great holiday tradition I now feel quite ill. Personally I blame Doug and Missjenjen for passing on their mystery illness. Nonetheless it was really great to see them. Even if I did get my arse kicked at Scrabble.

My big event for Easter was going to see Jack Johnson and Ben Harper in Sydney (sigh). To give you the lowlights:

 People who stand and talk loudly and audibly throughout breathtakingly beautiful performances should be taken outside and summarily executed.
 So should people who loudly and continually scream during the encore for the artist to sing a particular piece, when it was actually about the third song performed.
 People who are over 6 feet tall should not stand toward the back of the crowd, directly in front of people who are 5 feet tall. There were a lot of very tall men at that concert. Had they been one meter back their view would have been uninterrupted, and so would mine.
 Staying with an old friend in Sydney and catching up is fantastic, but proceed with caution when friend is minding two cats, particularly if one cat is old, has kidney problems, and decides to sleep on your head.
 Driving out of Sydney from the North Shore can be more of a challenge than you think, particularly when the exits from the Harbour Bridge do not include signs saying useful things such as ‘Freeway Tunnel’, ‘Highway’ or ‘Canberra’. Once you take a wrong turn and find yourself in the CBD it is impossible to get out again. Canberra to Sydney = 3 hours. Sydney to Canberra = 5 hours.

And the highlights:

 Getting into the Hawaiian surfy vibe during Jack Johnson’s set.
 Watching people trying to exercise their inalienable right to get stoned at a Ben Harper concert, when in a well-patrolled non-smoking venue.
 Someone managing to pass Ben Harper a beanie during the concert and having him read out the accompanying note – Dear Ben, my Nanna and I knitted this for you.
 Ben Harper having 10,000 screaming fans in the palm of his hand.
He sang Sexual Healing and 10,000 people simultaneously orgasmed.
He sang Walk Away and 10,000 people wept.
He Sang Power of the Gospel and 10,000 people had an intense religious experience.
He sang I’ll Rise and 10,000 rose and went absolutely fucking nuts.

At that point he could have directed the crowd to storm a fortress and they would have.

Other than that my weekend consisted of sitting around with good friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, eating Chinese food or chips, and drinking beer. And eating Easter eggs.

OK, so two out of three isn’t bad.

Happy Eostre

2003-04-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

Easter - not just an excuse to go on holiday and eat chocolate. In celebration of this important festival I thought I would spare some thought for its origins, before that whole thing with Jesus started up.

Many religions and traditions observe holy days and other celebrations during March and April, linked in some way to the spring or vernal equinox.

The word ‘Easter’ comes from Eostre, the Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. Her feast day was held on the full moon following the vernal equinox. According to one legend Eostre saved the life of an injured bird by transforming it into a hare. The hare retained the ability to lay eggs, which it would decorate and leave as gifts for the goddess.

The egg is also an important symbol in many other traditions. The ancient Persians would celebrate the solar new year on March 21 by exchanging gifts of coloured eggs. The ancient Egyptians offered coloured eggs to the gods. Eggs are also a symbol of rebirth and fertility, important themes in the pagan as well as Christian and Semitic traditions.

Easter symbolism can also be traced to the many fertility goddesses associated with rebirth and resurrection, such as Ishtar (Mesopotamia), Isis (Egypt), Astarte/Ashtoreth (Phoenecia), Ostara (Germany) and Demeter (Greece). Common legends involve the birth of a holy child, and a visit to and rise from the underworld.

Some of these goddesses make an appearance in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a novel about, well, I would hate to try and pin down exactly what Neil’s work is ‘about’. But it is always intelligent, intriguing, and inspirational (sorry, just felt in the mood for some assonance). And it rocks, nuff said.

Fertility goddesses were often worshipped with rites which included a great deal of sex, which was believed to encourage the gods to procreate, thus increasing the herds and crops and whatever else people wanted an abundance of.

So maybe Easter should be an excuse to go on holiday, eat chocolate and have sex.

AAAAAGGGHHH!!!!

2003-04-15T16:24:00.000-07:00

Don't you just love those times when you are so busy and so frantic that you can just feel the stress levels rising and your shoulders hurt from being tense and your jaw is clenched too tightly and you can feel a headache coming on? No?

Me neither.

Real Women Have Curves (and I should know)

2003-04-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

Monday morning - so sad after a very relaxing and indulgent weekend. It started off with a delicious brunch with the lovely Fiona, and ended with a couple of movies. One of these was Real Women Have Curves.

Real Women Have Curves concerns Ana (America Ferrera), a first generation Mexican-American girl in East Los Angeles. She is smart, ambitious, and yes, pretty curvy. Her family doesn’t really understand her desire to go to college. Her mother Carmen in particular insists she start earning money, helping out at her sister Estela’s sewing factory. Ana’s mother is hyper-critical, constantly nagging her to lose weight, the ultimate goal of which is to get her married and settled into a life of raising babies and working in a factory.

Despite the title, Real Women Have Curves is not so much about Ana coming to realise her own beauty – she actually starts off as fairly self-confident. What she does do is assert her value as something other than her body, whether that be her physical appearance or her reproductive potential.

Ana’s personal development is more about learning to articulate what she wants for herself. By working in her sister’s sewing outlet (which she initially scorns as a sweatshop), Ana appreciates for the first time how hard women like her mother and sister work and the sacrifices they have made. While she comes to value them more, it also makes her more determined to use the talents and opportunities she has.

Of course, ‘working class girl asserts independence and realises dream’ is not exactly new territory. Neither is the critical mother unable to cope with her daughter’s assimilation into a new culture (Bend It Like Beckham comes to mind as a recent example). But Real Women Have Curves is nicely told and full of interesting characters. Written, directed and starring Latinos, it paints a much more multi-faceted picture of immigrant culture than you get in mainstream American releases (for a start there is not a single drug dealer in the whole movie). The father and grandfather, for example, are very sympathetic to Ana, recognising her ambition as the fulfillment of the search for a better life which brought them to America in the first place.

Of course, I don’t at all have a personal bias towards movies concerning curvaceous women of non-Anglo background (or in my case not-entirely-Anglo background).

Written by George Lavoo and Josephina Lopez. Directed by Patrica Cardosa.

What does your spam say about you?

2003-04-10T16:40:00.000-07:00

Like everyone with an email address, I get a fair amount of spam, and the Hotmail account just seems to attract it. I have noticed that I seem to get the same categories of spam all the time, and I'm starting to wonder what this says about me and my internet usage.

For example, I must be fairly unique among email users in never, ever getting spammed with porn. I don't know why. One of my housemates was until recently receiving truly frightening quantities of hardcore lesbian porn at her Hotmail account, despite activating the junk mail filters. Apparently I'm just not in that target demographic.

On the other hand I do get a lot of those messages advertising penis extensions.

I also keep getting messages inviting me to purchase university degrees from a variety of institutions. I would be vaguely curious to know how realistic they look, but I seem to get by with the degree I actually earned.

I've been getting a lot of copies of what was originally known as the Nigerian scam, both at my personal and work accounts. It seems to have become international now. You know the one - Greetings and the blessings of the Lord to you. I wish to explain my reaching out to you. I am the son / daughter / wife / brother / assistant to the late military / political / religious leader of Kenya / Nigeria / etc. When he died / was killed / was overthrown I came into possession of some US$5-100 million dollars. This money is now in a series of European bank accounts. Since I am under house arrest / in exile I am unable to access these funds. I seek a trustworthy partner into whose account I can deposit this money. In exchange for providing your bank account details, I will give you 20-50% of the total sum. May God bless you for your kind understanding. Sure you will buddy. Got any bridges for sale?

The other thing I keep getting in my personal and work accounts are coy messages from SomeoneLikesYou.com, telling me that someone has a crush on me. The idea is that you are supposed to guess who by entering the email addresses of potential admirers. If you guess correctly you get a congratulatory message and encouragement to go on a date. My favourite message so far came with the subject line "Less dissing, more kissing", and a rebuke for not having guessed my admirer. I presume (sincerely hope) that no one I know would resort to such a measure to let me know. It appears to be a pathetic excuse to send me spam from the website's sponsors.

If I took all this spam into account and attempted to use it as a picture of my life, it would be really depressing. According to the world of internet spam, I am in need of money, qualifications, and a date with a guy with a large dick.

Of course the really depressing thing about spam is when you are expecting a message from someone. You log into your account and see that you have six new messages, anticipation grows, and then they all turn out to be crap. God forbid you should actually get a message from someone you haven't heard from in a while. Like, oh I don't know, your brother. E-mail me you lazy bastard. And call your mother.

The Wednesday Whinge

2003-04-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

I know that violence against children is wrong. It's just that, sometimes, it's really, really tempting.

One of my latest resolutions has been to go swimming every weekday during my lunch break. There is a 50m pool quite close to my office, which means that I can swim 1km and get back to the office looking vaguely respectable within a reasonable timeframe. Yesterday I approached the door with some foreboding - there was a group of around 40 teenagers standing around outside. I went in anyway as they appeared to be waiting to leave, not enter. As I walked down the corridor toward the change-rooms, I realised they were waiting for the rest of the class.

Don't get me wrong, I actually quite like children, in general. In principle I would like to have some of my own one day. But a room full of shrieking 13-year-old girls is a hell which no one should be forced to endure. Particularly if the room is small and tiled, causing every sound to rebound and echo with frightening intensity. There must have been about 30 of them. It felt like 300.

At one point, sick of dodging around clusters of young girls clutching towels protectively to their non-existent breasts, I retreated to the toilets. This was a mistake. Every other cubicle had a 13-year-old girl in it, and they were yelling at each other from one end of the block to the next. Then they actually started a 'who can make the loudest noise' competition. Through all this there was a teacher in the next room, but she was obviously immune to this by now (or deaf) and didn't try to get them to stop. Which meant that not only was she of no use in stopping the madness, she also prevented me from following my natural instinct, which was to start screaming "Shut the fuck up you little fuckers before I come in there and make you", and move on from there.

Fortunately I managed to blow off a lot of my acquired tension in the pool.

And another thing. Every time I go to the pool these days there is at least one person walking up and down in the shallow end. I have no problem with this. It is probably quite good exercise. But given that it makes you, by quite a substantial margin, the slowest thing in the pool, wouldn't you think that this was an activity best undertaken in the slow lane? Especially if you decide to relieve the boredom by going with a friend and walking side-by-side in the lane? No? Well, let's just hope that I don't cause us both the trauma of swimming straight into your spongy arse before I realise you are there.

My other whinge for the day is that I have to get my windscreen replaced today. I was just driving over one of the bridges that cross the lake, heading for the city, when a small stone flung up by the car in front of me made a chip in my windscreen. Which turned into a crack. Which got bigger. I wouldn't mind so much if I had been driving somewhere exciting, on a dirt road. It's a chance you take. But I can't believe I ruined my windscreen driving through the middle of bloody Canberra.

Oh well, I feel better now. One of my housemates made everyone blueberry pancakes for breakfast this morning, so life can't be all bad.

Happy Birth Day Astro Boy!

2003-04-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

I loved Astro Boy. Like Monkey, G-Force and the Transformers, he played an integral part in my childhood imaginings. Astro boy was small and sweet, but super-tough and capable of shooting bullets out of his arse. What more do you need in a superhero? Plus he could fly, which as previously discussed is about the coolest thing you can do. Astro Boy conjures up fond memories of getting up early on Saturday and eating breakfast in front of the TV in my PJs.

Created by Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy was ‘born’ on 7 April 2003. Originally Tetsuwan Atomu, or The Mighty Atom, Astro Boy was launched in 1951 as a comic book, then a black and white TV series in the 60s. The version familiar to those of us who were kids in the eighties set the story back to 2030 (preserving the original ‘50-years from now’ concept, and presumably accounting for the realisation that by 2003 we were unlikely to have a large robot underclass).

As the story goes, Dr Boynton, Head of the Ministry of Science, created Astro Boy as an exact replica of his son Toby, who was killed in a car accident. Presumably they meant ‘exact replica’ apart from the super strength, enhanced hearing, rocket-powered feet, searchlight eyes, hip-mounted machine gun, and laser beams in his fingertips. In one version of the story, Astro Boy is rejected by his father. In the version released in the 80s, Dr Boynton mysteriously disappears. Astro’s guardian then becomes Dr Elufun, creator of the Robot Bill of Rights and of Astro Boy’s robot parents. Astro also has a nemesis, Atlas, who was built from Astro’s orginal plans, but has an additional ‘omega factor’ which allows him to commit evil deeds.

The central Tokyo district of Takadanobaba, where Astro Boy was set, has been organising special celebrations for his birth day, including displays, a parade, and playing the Astro Boy theme to signal the departure of the trains at the local station.

For someone simultaneously new born and 52 years old, Astro Boy is not doing too badly.

2003-04-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Ah, fresh victims for my ever-growing army of the undead

I have a new flunkey today, a shiny, fresh-faced intern. For the next several months she is mine! She is so young, and enthusiastic, and energetic, and helpful. Oh, how soon she will learn. Actually, I had the frightening revelation that technically she is only four years younger than me. But I've spent those four years in this job, and she's still a student, so she seems really young. Besides I'm sure I wasn't that bouncy and keen four years ago. Anyway, I'm glad I've finally passed the point where the office interns are older than me.

I think I will ease her in to the madness of our office environment before warping her fragile little mind. Little does she know that she is but a small part of my ultimate long term goal. What is that? Same thing we do every night Pinky - try to take over the world! Mwah ha ha ha ha! (That was my evil laugh, just so you know.)

I came across my amusing new item for the day on the ABC website. It seems that the town of Bagdad in Tasmania (population 650) has become the centre of some very confused attention since the war began, with internet searchers confusing it for the Iraqi capital. Some of the more clueless of the 15,000 daily visitors to the town’s Bagdad Online Access Centre have offered words of support and advised the residents to keep their heads down and mind the bombs. Having checked out this site I am at a loss to explain how anyone could think this was an Iraqi website, but then I am often surprised by other people’s stupidity. Presumably the confusion would only have gotten worse if they had discovered Tasmania’s Walls of Jerusalem National Park.

2003-04-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

You say 'collateral damage', I say 'dead children'. Let's call the whole thing off.

It has been a depressing morning in the news so far. Unfortunately my job involves scanning a lot of news sources every morning, which gives me the opportunity to read a whole lot of depressing news in a short space of time.

There has been a lot of coverage today of the mounting civilian deaths in Iraq. Of course, no one can be very surprised that there are civilian causalities in this, or any other war. After the hard-sell of this war as one of liberation, politicians are grudgingly being forced to acknowledge the suffering of the civilian population. The spin-doctoring as they try to dodge responsibility has been disappointing and offensive, but again, not particularly surprising.

“The President always regrets any innocent loss of life and he recognises that most innocents have been lost in this war at the hands of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen,” spokesman Ari Fleischer said. “That's who is to blame for the loss of innocent lives.”

Oh, of course, Saddam is to blame for American troops killing Iraqi civilians. I wonder if he is also to blame for American troops killing British troops. But as long as the coalition ends up killing fewer civilians than Saddam, that’s OK. And given that Saddam has been in power for a long time, even with their fancy-pants new weapons (with guidance systems even worse than anything Microsoft could concoct) it will take a while before the coalition-inflicted death toll can seriously compete.

Our own Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, is backing the US position that civilian casualties are the fault of the Iraqi Government. He has also blamed recent civilian casualties at a market in Baghdad, not on US missiles, but on Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles going astray, despite acknowledging he has no evidence of this.

If the civilian population of Iraq could dodge bullets with the same skill these politicians dodge blame, there wouldn’t be any “collateral damage”.

The only reaction I have seen with any degree of dignity is that of Australian Defence Force chief Peter Cosgrove. No one could accuse General Cosgrove of being unpatriotic, naïve, or unaware of the situation facing soldiers in the field. Nonetheless he managed to express sorrow without trying to shift the blame. He acknowledged that the nature of war is such that civilians will always suffer, and that even the best of soldiers is human and can make mistakes. "Those scenes are devastating... and they play over and over in the consciousness of people who understand that this war is a series of tragedies."

Cosgrove also acknowledged a degree of moral uncertainty, saying he tried to weigh the deaths against the even worse horror of leaving the Iraqi regime in power. Whether you agree with the weight of his assessment or not, unlike the politicians at least he does not paint a picture of the unsullied and blameless forces of good versus the source of all evil.

In criminal psychology, among the characteristics that define a psychopath are a lack of remorse or a sense of responsibility.

I think we may all be in a lot of trouble.

2003-03-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

Hip-Hop Chop

Michelle Yeoh - among the many things I have wanted to be in my life. For the uninitiated, she kicked ass in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon – the older, wiser woman who was in love with Chow Yun Fat, not the young whiny one with an attitude problem. I really love martial arts flicks, which if done well are fast-paced, skillful, and violent without being gory.

This weekend I went to see Cradle to the Grave, the latest Hollywood Jet Li film. In case you had any doubts, this will not go down as one of the greats of martial arts cinema history. It did provide the couple of hours distraction I expected, as well as many examples of classic movie formula.

Plot Summary Taiwanese bad guys kidnap the daughter of a diamond thief with a heart of gold (played by rapper DMX). Jet, DMX and a merry band of sidekicks have to get her back and foil the kidnapper’s evil plan, which threatens the world as we know it. Conveniently enough, the kidnapper was once a friend of Jet’s, who betrayed and tried to kill him.

Buddy movies In the eighties, black guy/white guy buddy movies were very big – the Lethal Weapon series for example. These days black guy/Chinese guy seems to be the formula of choice. Think Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour, or Jet Li and another musician, the late Aaliyah, in Romeo Must Die (OK so in this case black chick/Chinese dude). This is a combination which allows for wacky cross-cultural mishaps, and provides one street-wise bad-ass, and one little dude who causes great surprise when he kicks the shit out of 20 guys twice his size.

Asians are inscrutable Jackie Chan tends to do the wacky Chinese guy shtick, Jet Li is more your silent type. This is probably almost as much to do with his fairly tenuous grasp on English as racial stereotyping. He really didn’t say much that was not basic and functional, which made him problematic as a sympathetic character as you really knew nothing about him personally. He also notes that, being a Taiwanese secret agent, he is hampered in America by not being allowed to beat information out of people.

Diamond Thieves are not really criminals Diamond thieves have always been the gentlemen of the movie criminal world – think David Niven. It is almost a Robin Hood image. Early in a heist DMX’s merry men inquire as to who owns the gems they are stealing. Apparently only drug dealers and crime lords can afford that kind of jewelry, which makes it all OK. DMX also has a no-guns policy and is a doting father, so clearly these facts outweigh his criminal tendencies.

Every movie needs a cat-fight Naturally, the movie also had a couple of hot chicks – one Asian, one black. In accordance with racial stereotypes, the Asian chick was exotic, deadly, and would torture you for fun to fill in a slow weekend. The black girl was sassy, sexy, not averse to giving a blow-job to create a diversion, and had a heart of gold. Naturally, the two girls end up fighting. No, they didn’t end up kissing.

Hollywood has discovered the martial arts flick, but still hasn’t figured out what to do with it. The martial arts skills are not used to best advantage, which means there is not sufficient distraction to compensate for the thin plot and characterisation. You really need to watch the classic Hong Kong kung fu flick to get any real satisfaction. Yes, the plot and characters are often stupider than those in Hollywood, but man those guys really kick ass, so who cares. Also look forward to the big budget Hero, which should see Jet Li in true form.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I just need to learn how to use a dozen more weapons, run up walls, and keep a poker face.

2003-03-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

Icarus Nightmare

I haven’t had a wacky New Zealand story for a little while, so my news for the day is that a group of passengers in New Plymouth had to get out of their seats and push a 33-seater plane on Saturday so it could get a jump-start.

Six of the sixteen passengers, the pilot and co-pilot pushed it 5m to a power lead to jump-start the engine. Passengers were apparently amused. Not to mention efficient - the plane actually reached Auckland ten minutes early.

Now, I am not at all afraid of flying. Depending on the circumstances, my feelings about flying range from excitement, to boredom, to mild nausea. And once, memorably, extreme nausea. My point is that even though I am not a nervous flyer, I really think there are some things that passengers should not be exposed to. And push-starting your plane is a lot of them.

I have had several experiences on planes that I could have done without. Once I was on a little 8-seater to Newcastle. On these planes the passengers can see into the cockpit and out the front window. This makes it very easy to judge how much a little plane like that sways when coming in to land. It also allowed me to see a flashing red alarm light and hear the accompanying warning beep as we got closer to the ground. I realise that this is probably normal, but I really didn’t need to see it.

Another time I was in a little plane sitting on the tarmac with the engine off. Given that it was a really hot day, the pilots had taken off a little sunroof thing while waiting. I didn’t actually realise that planes came with sunroofs, and it struck me as somewhat problematic. Especially as it turns out that they can be real bastards to get back on again.

I tend to think of flying as something of an act of faith. Most people are not intimately acquainted with the exact mechanics of how tonnes of metal can fly through the air. You just take your seat and trust to the fact that someone else has it all figured out. Just in case the reason all this technology works is because we believe it does.

By the way, is it just me or is something strange going on? I opened a news website today and two headlines caught my eye - Govt to fight mutant seaweed and Mutant common cold virus blamed. Maybe the upcoming X-Men sequel (imaginatively titled X-2) will have all the answers.

2003-03-23T17:22:00.000-08:00

Fire and Ice

One thing people notice about living in Canberra is the weather, which varies a lot between seasons. Summer days are in the mid-thirties (celsius for you foreigners) and scorchingly dry, winter nights are below zero and frosty. Sometimes Canberra weather changes seem to happen at vastly inappropriate times. For example it very rarely snows in Canberra (less than half a dozen times that I can remember, although since I am only 26 that is not all that impressive), but when it does it sometimes does so at a really weird time of year, like October (spring).

Anyway, I had some photos developed the other day. The film had been in the camera for a while, which can often lead to some interesting surprises. In this case, I was struck by the contrast between two photos taken at exactly the same place - from the front door of my house.

This photo was taken on 18 January, the day fires destroyed a large part of the city. Although my house was far removed from any danger, ash and burnt leaves were falling on the house.

This photo was taken on 14 March. A sudden heavy hailstorm left ice piled on the ground like snow, papered my car in tiny bits of leaf, and left water several inches deep on my front doorstep.

I don't think I could live somewhere with predictable weather patterns - it would be really boring.

2003-03-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

What a Wonderful World

So the war has finally started, and I have the urge to purchase a bottle of malt whiskey and a nice soft blanket, and spend some time curled up in a ball.

Leaving the more intelligent analysis of the situation to Doug and Beth, and on the principle that in times of trouble, opportunities to laugh should be seized with both hands, I bring you the news that America decided to attack Iraq because Bush was scared Saddam would figure out how to utilise technology from a crashed alien spaceship.

It seems that a UFO crashed in Iraq in 1998. Since then top American secret agents have been worried that Iraq will reverse engineer the alien technology to build their own spaceships and weapons. But apparently not very many of them have been worried since you need MK Ultra clearance to be told about alien technology, and not even the President has that. George Bush junior only knows because his daddy used to be head of the CIA. Nonetheless UFO watcher ‘Bre’ in Wellington knows all about it.

Hell, it’s almost as convincing an argument as any other I have heard for war.

And as if the world was not already a frightening enough place, it seems that Pauline Hanson chose the first day of war to start recording an album.

For her first step into the world of music stardom, she chose to cover the classic What a Wonderful World. I have heard this song performed with beautiful depth of emotion by two great artists – Louis Armstrong, and Rowlf, the piano-playing dog from The Muppets. Why couldn’t she choose something else? Redneck Wonderland, for example.

In a move of almost unimaginable cruelty, Hanson urged voters to keep her in politics rather than pursuing a full-time singing career. What kind of a sick choice is that? Vote for me or I’ll keep singing. The Australian reports that Hanson ‘missed the start, was hopelessly out of tune and didn’t get within cooee of the high notes’. It was, in her words, ‘worse than when I gave my immigration policy speech’.

I was trying to decide whether the woman would do more damage in politics or music. At first I thought politics was the clear winner, but then I wasn’t so sure. After all she wasn’t in any danger of running the country, instead she was spreading hatred and misery throughout the land. And the problem is she could do the same thing by singing. Ultimately though, I still think she is more dangerous in politics. She gets more publicity that way. And while she may get media coverage of the fact that she is singing, by the sounds of it not many outlets will be rushing out to play the recording itself.

We live in hope.

2003-03-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

I had lunch today at a major shopping mall near my office. Outside the entrance was a round-cheeked, white-haired old man who was attracting the attention of passers-by. He looked like someone who gets called Poppa by his grandkids. The sort of old boy who plays 'got your nose' with young children, and likes nothing better than when his wife Betty hands him a cuppa and a freshly baked scone. If you had to guess what he was doing outside a shopping mall, you would think it was selling Legacy badges, or collecting for the Salvation Army. Actually what he was doing was waving a hand-painted sign reading 'America: Greatest Terrorist Threat', and handing out pamphlets for an anti-war demonstration.

Go Poppa!

2003-03-18T15:43:00.000-08:00

Things that make you go ???

This Saturday I am finally getting around to having my hair cut. Once upon a time I had hair past my waist, now it clears my collar, or at least it does when I haven’t left it too long since my last haircut. Having short hair is convenient in most ways, except that when you need a haircut it is really obvious. So I experienced real trauma when I rang up to make an appointment, only to be told that my usual hairdresser no longer works weekends. How selfish is that! I need stability in my life. I need someone who doesn’t feel compelled to put twelve different products in my hair and pressure me to buy them all. I need someone who provides decent coffee and biscuits. Conversely, the trust you build with your hairdresser means there is always that guilt when you try going somewhere different – I’m sorry, I felt vulnerable, I had split ends, she didn’t mean anything, honestly! So now my relationship with my hairdresser is over, I think I feel ready to move on, meet someone new, someone who will understand the needs of my hair. Hopefully this will be one type of relationship I actually manage successfully.

Because I felt the need to be educated this morning, I decided to check out the New Scientist website, something I haven’t done for a while. There is a great section where you can write in niggling little scientific questions like Why is snot green? and Could a blind chameleon still change colour?

Did you know that the reason you rub your eyes when you are sleepy is that it stimulates the vagus nerve, which slows your heartbeat. Apparently this technique is also used in martial arts, massage, hypnotism, and disabling violent prisoners or patients. Interesting theory as a martial arts technique, but I think if I ever get into a fight I would just poke them in the eye instead.

And the What The? for the day is the news that a documentary has named David Beckham as Britain's most famous black man. Apparently Britain doesn’t have any black superstars, in a Michael Jordan kind of a way, they have Beckham instead.

Obvious, really, when you think about it.

2003-03-16T04:09:00.000-08:00

Read my T-shirt

T-shirts have always been a popular canvas on which to express political opinion. Some messages, like I love Kylie Minogue come and go. Others, like Peace or Make Love Not War stay around forever. It probably says something sad that we still need to be chanting and waving (or wearing) this sort of thing.

Slogan T-shirts as political expression seem to be big news at the moment. There was the lawyer in the US arrested by shopping mall security guards after refusing to remove an anti-war shirt he bought at the mall. Charges were eventually dropped. An American teenager was asked to cover up his Who Would Jesus Bomb shirt while his school principal determined whether or not the boy’s free speech was infringing anyone else’s rights. Another high school kid was sent home for his Bush: International Terrorist shirt. (The thing that amused me about that story was that school administrators justified this by referring to a Supreme Court ruling on free speech. The student, obviously a credit to his school, pointed out they were quoting the dissenting opinion, and that the majority ruling actually supported his right of free speech.) And in Australia, visitors to Parliament House were asked to leave due to a ban on wearing political slogans in the building. (Thanks Doug, the hive-mind strikes again).

These days, political T-shirts are not just hand-written or home screen-printed personal expressions. Often they are produced in bulk and make a lot of profit. Unfortunately, when political statement becomes a fashion accessory it can lose its meaning and become a logo, rather like wearing something emblazoned with ‘Calvin Klein’. I’d wager that a significant percentage of people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts couldn’t tell you what he fought for. Poor bastard is even selling Magnums now. (Actually they taste pretty good. I like them better than the Candy Warhol, but something tells me that Warhol would probably be more amused at the idea of selling ice-cream than Che).

On which theme, The Age ran a story on the weekend about ‘Monty’, an Australian designer selling ‘edgy’ topical Ts for anything up to $160 a pop. Monty’s upcoming show for Melbourne fashion week is about religious oppression. The problem, Monty opines, is “the lack of integration of male and female energy within a being”. Monty, who is “really into healing”, will be conveying this message to the world via the medium of a ‘rap opera’. And a montage of Queen songs. And fashion, naturally. Still, you have to admire the clarity of thought involved in, apparently, being able to screen print ALL your philosophies onto T-shirts. You would think they wouldn’t fit.

The Age's writer asked what difference a slogan T-shirt actually makes, but to me that’s not the point. No one thinks that wearing a No HoWARd T-shirt will actually change anyone’s mind about Iraq. But a political T-shirt is a way to make a personal public stand, a small cry of protest. And then sometimes millions of people around the world make the same cry.

2003-03-13T16:23:00.000-08:00

I'm back, what did I miss?

I’m actually back at work again, and look like making it through the whole day. I quite like the idea of having several days off work then going in on Friday, just in time to have the weekend off. Of course, it would only really be fun if I wasn't sick.

Given that I am still feeling a little scattered today, I bring you a random collection of things I noticed today.

POP CULTURE:
A Fox network affiliate in America has pulled the reality television show Married by America after only one airing, stating that the show "did not reflect prevailing standards of good taste" and was "clearly demeaning to the institution of marriage."

For those of you who don’t know, Married by America features five singles who are given a selection of potential partners by the show. Family, friends and (naturally) the viewing public, pick their perfect mate, and supposedly, the happy couple then commits to marriage.

What disturbs me is that the station actually needed to air the pilot show before it figured out that it was not in good taste.

QUIZ FOR THE DAY: What Revolution Are you?

What revolution are You?
Made by altern_active

LOCAL STORY:
The Canberra Legislative Assembly has voted to remove discriminatory language against gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people from ACT Legislation. The Bill amends 37 Acts so they recognise same-sex relationships, and cover things such as domestic violence, property law, medical treatment, and guardianship of the ageing or mentally infirm. A second stage of law reform will involve issues such as civil unions and parenting.

Who says Canberra is just full of useless, pot-smoking, porn-obsessed public servant wankers?

OK, don't answer that question.

2003-03-12T18:35:00.000-08:00

The Cult of Productivity

So I'm sitting here on yet another sick day away from work. I tried going back to the office yesterday, but this proved to be a bad move and I came home at lunch time. I really shouldn't have gone to work, and I am forced to conclude that the only reason I did was that I am really, really bored. I've slept, watched crappy TV, played solitaire, rearranged photo albums, burnt some CDs and minidisks . . . I was even starting to get this guilt/anxiety feeling about not being at work, and that is REALLY sick. Oh god, I've been brainwashed by the work cult. Being at work for the morning yesterday was long enough to prove that there was really nothing so urgent happening that I needed to be there. Apparantly I just have this need to be a useful and productive member of society. Who would have thought it?

One more day of this and I'll be sitting in an upstairs room, spying on the neighbours with a telescope. Not that we have one. A telescope I mean. We have neighbours.

Meanwhile other people are doing useful things like working, shopping, and protesting outside Howard's "Why we need to go to war" speech. I would have watched it on TV, but I'm sick enough already - I don't need that shit. I've had this idea that every household should have a supply of soft foam projectiles, like nerf, in the TV room. Then when you got really pissed off at whoever is on TV you could throw stuff at them without damaging the TV.

Oh, and I have an addition to the truly amazing computing questions I've been asked. I'm sitting at home yesterday, the phone rings, and the follwing conversation takes place:
Me: Hello?
X: Hi Marissa, it's X. Sorry to call you at home when you're sick.
Me: That's OK, what's up?
X: I need to scan something, so I need you to walk me through some easy step-by-step instructions.
Me: OK, see the piece of paper I stuck to the wall above the scanner, labelled 'Using the Scanner'?
X: Hang on . . . Oh, OK that's great. I'll follow that then and just call you if I have any problems.
Me: No worries.
Hang up. Less than 2 minutes later the phone rings again.
Me: Hello?
X: Hi, it's me again. Sorry, but I really think I need the complete dummies instructions.
Me: [Thinking I was sure those were the complete dummies instructions] OK.
X: So it says I need to start by pressing the big green button, but it doesn't seem to be responding.
Me: That's strange [about to suggest checking that all the cables are properly plugged in]
X: Oh wait, I forgot to ask, do I have to turn on the computer first?
Me: [Following long pause] Yes. Yes you do.

I mean, I understand not everybody is familiar with this stuff straight away, but surely logic should come in to play. It's a scanner - it looks like a big flat tupperware container with three buttons on it. If you didn't turn on the computer, how would the scanner know what to do? Hmmm, I, scanner, sense that you wish to scan this photograph at high resolution, make it a jpg file, name it workphoto1.jpg and save it on the C drive under 'My Photos'.

I don't understand people.

2003-03-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Fully sick mate

A long pause in the blogging process for the last few days as I am currently at home sick :-( So you need to imagine this entry in a suitably pathetic, croaky sort of a voice. As my housemate kindly pointed out, it sounds as if my voice is breaking at last. At 26 I am obviously just a late developer (one day my child you will cease to be a girl, and become a man).

Anyway, I have now taken as much sick leave in the past two days as I took in the previous two years. This sounds virtuous of me, until you realise that in the previous two years I took about 13 weeks annual leave instead. Ah, nothing like paid vacation time in Europe - to be wandering along the banks of the Seine, getting paid as if you are at work. Never did understand why people want to stay at university forever. Being paid is fun. Being paid for doing nothing is even better.

This is the first time in quite a while that I have been sick in the way that totally makes you regress to childhood. I mean that in the ‘build me a fort of blankets and look after me’ sort of way, not the fevered delirium sort of way. I want to curl up in a little ball and cuddle something soft. Pathetic? Yes, but I don’t care. My housemate made me scrambled eggs for breakfast today. She rocks.

Being ill also gave me some very bizarre dreams last night. The central point of all my dreams eludes me, but it involved the establishment of a very noisy veterinary school at the ANU, me and some friends moving into a tree-house (I’m fairly sure you were there, Lyn), and a pet miniature Tasmanian Tiger. It started out as a fairly normal Tasmanian Tiger (I mean, ignoring the fact that they are extinct and were not small enough to pick up with one hand and tuck under your arm), but by the end of the dream it had turned into a Tasmanian Tiger wearing a kilt and riding a motorbike. A very small motorbike.

I swear the only things I have taken are vitamin C, throat gargle, and (insert name of painkiller containing paracetamol and codeine).

And the latest in the ‘why New Zealand is a funky-ass place’ news? A fabulous aricle about a NZ$200 000 dispute between two New Zealand companies that was resolved in an out-of-court settlement - a best-of-three arm-wrestling match.

The match took place between the respective chief executives, which I think is healthy. It shows a willingness to take responsibility, and to do some real grunt work. The defeated CEO stated that losing didn’t hurt nearly as much as the lawyers’ bills would have. Could only have been better if it were mud wrestling.

And a great big hooray me because I have tickets to see Ben Harper and Jack Johnson in Sydney (insert happy dance here).

2003-03-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

A Whiter Shade of Black

I was reading an interesting opinion piece in The Australian today about anti-war protestors giving support to Saddam and ignoring the suffering of the Iraqi people.

This sort of thing has been said before, including by the Prime Minister, with varying degrees of vitriol. In this case the article was by a former Iraqi refugee.

I don’t feel the need to go into an Iraq debate here as other people have already done so admirably. However I found the article interesting as an example of the way in which issues of significance are always portrayed as a set of simple binary opposites. EITHER you are a rabid warmonger who wants to bomb the hell out of Iraq and doesn’t care about dead Iraqi babies, OR you are a naïve pacifist who supports Saddam and doesn’t care about the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people.

Doug has already talked about his own “no unilateral war by America” protest being interpreted as “no war at any cost”. Everything is portrayed as a case of polar opposites, rather than a complex set of issues. Is there adequate justification for war? Would such action have legitimacy under international law? Are measures in place to minimise the effect of war on the civilian population? Will the West support post-war reconstruction? Is the short-term civilian suffering in war outweighed by the chance for long-term change in Iraq? Will a war succeed in ousting Saddam? If so will it lead to freedom for the Iraqi people or will he simply be replaced by a new dictator? What effect would a war have on regional stability? This all seems to get swept aside for a simple Bomb: Yes/No mentality.

The same phenomenon is notable in public debate about indigenous issues in Australia, which are inevitably portrayed as Black Australia vs. White Australia. This totally ignores the wide diversity of views held by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Not to mention perpetrating this strange myth that black and white are the only options. Like, what about Asian Australians? Or African Australians? Well, you’re black. And you’re Australian. But you’re not black Australia. Goddamn, this shit drives me crazy. I wrote my thesis on this sort of thing – still not adequate catharsis.

The media largely seems to cater for the delivery of information in thirty-second bite-sized pieces – the Fun Size pack of current affairs. I’ve seen more in-depth analysis of reality television programs than some of the media coverage of the Iraq issue.

So, by that measure, the real news affecting Australian society today? One of J-Lo’s ex-husbands, choreographer and dancer Chris Judd, just won the American version of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here by not getting voted off during two weeks filming in the Australian rainforest. Or, as the article put it, he was voted ‘King of the Australian jungle’. I know they were just reproducing an AAP article, but you would think that News Ltd would have realised that we don’t actually have ‘jungle’ in Australia. Apparently not. Upon winning, Judd thanked the American audience for liking him. Maybe they just refrained from voting him off because it meant he was the one who had to live the longest with “heavy rain conditions, spiders, snakes and mosquitoes.”

I’m not a celebrity, get me out of here.

2003-03-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

Xtreme Employment - The New Reality TV

Potentially frightening article in the Sydney Morning Herald about interviewers in today’s competitive job market resorting to “extreme” selection methods.

Great, like job interviews aren’t already traumatic enough.

Maybe I watch too much television, but the idea of extreme (or should that be Xtreme) selection methods brought to mind something like ‘Survivor’. Short-listed candidates are dumped in the wilderness and must provide for themselves, pass a series of grueling tests, and form strategic alliances. Makes sense - you could test leadership, teamwork, initiative, creative thinking, working under pressure, negotiation skills, and whether or not people would look good at the office pool party.

Actually what the article was really referring to was the use of a new breed of "KQs" or "killer questions" designed to disorientate applicants. These also address the fact that it is usually not that hard to figure out what interviewers want to hear. Asking KQs makes people think on their feet, and tests how they react under pressure. According to a survey quoted in the article, 90 percent of employers pose a killer question in interviews.

The article also helpfully provided five killer questions asked at interviews:
1. Would you ever lie to get a job?
Absolutely not. On the other hand I could be lying about that to get this job.
2. What were you hoping we wouldn't ask you?
Well, that question for a start. And anything concerning the chronological gap on my resume, which refers to the time I spent in jail in a small South American country.
3. Name five members of the cabinet.
Well, there’s Posh, Baby, Sporty, Scary, and that other one. No, wait . . .
4. Tell me a joke.
A naked woman walks into a bar with a poodle under one arm and a 12 foot salami under the other . . .
5. If you were the prime minister, which issues would you tackle?
Prime Minister? That’s Supreme Leader to you! Bwa ha ha ha! Wait, did I just say that out loud?

Traumatic job interview stories welcome.

2003-03-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

If I could talk to the animals . . .

Stumbled across an article today about a woman in Ohio who claims that she can talk to animals. For US$50 an hour you can be the recipient of such revelations as ‘No, your horse doesn’t hate you. It’s just really bored.’ (At an alleged 3,000 consultations per year, the woman apparently makes about US$150,000 talking to animals). The article even helpfully provided Ms Doolittle’s contact number (no, I mean the ‘talking to animals’ Doolittle, not the ‘wouldn’t it be luverly’, flower selling one).

All this got me thinking about my childhood, in which the ability to talk to animals was number two on my list of wished-for superpowers. Number one was the ability to fly. I spent a lot of time dreaming about this one. Still do. In this case I think I was concerned less with its world-saving aspects than the thought that being able to fly would be really, really fun. After all, unless it is teamed with other superpowers, for example incredible strength, being able to fly isn’t all that useful. You could probably see a lot more crime happening, but you wouldn’t really be able to do much about it.

The ‘talk to the animals’ wish linked nicely with my Narnia-inspired daydreams about riding around on big lions. I really had this thing about big cats, and birds of prey. Probably a combination of my liking for watching adventure-themed television and wildlife documentaries, and reading anything I could get my hands on.

I don’t remember any particular running storyline concerning my superhero status – just your basic world-saving stuff. I do remember giving some thought to the fact that riding around on lions in the rain would be really uncomfortable. I came up with a sort of weatherproof force-field that would be generated by a small device worn by the incredibly cooperative lion. In retrospect I am disturbed by the fact that I was sufficiently girly (or possibly anal) that I seem to have been more concerned with the force-field’s ability to repel water than, say, bullets.

Of course, the other problem with this whole scenario is that, to truly be useful, the ability to talk to animals needs to be combined with the ability to get animals to do what you want. Otherwise the natural response to ‘Hey Mr. Lion, savanna getting you down? Want to spend your days as a beast of burden, helping me fight crime?’ is likely to be ‘Oh good, lunch’.

On that note:

Also just found this story about a 7 year old New Zealand boy who punctured a lung trying to fly ‘like Harry Potter’ with the aid of a trampoline and an umbrella. Probably lucky he was only falling from the height of a trampoline, rather than trying to jump off a roof with the aid of a broomstick. The perils of childhood . . .

What was your favourite superpower?

2003-02-27T15:28:00.000-08:00

These are a few of my favourite things

FAVOURITE NEWS ARTICLE FOR TODAY:
“Reflectors will be attached to captive elephants in New Delhi to ensure they are visible to drivers at night to prevent collisions, a report said yesterday.”
From The Age

FAVOURITE NEWS HEADLINE:
‘Son of Star Wars’ too costly for phantom menace: NZ
Concerning the New Zealand Government’s entirely rational decision to not get involved in the US missile shield program.

FAVOURITE QUOTE CONCERNING A POSSIBLE WAR IN IRAQ
Jeremy Paxman: And you believe American intelligence?
Tony Blair: Well I do actually believe this intelligence.
Jeremy Paxman: Because there are a lot of dead people in an aspirin factory in Sudan who don't.
Courtesy of the BBC’s Newsnight

FAVOURITE SONG LYRICS:
“It's like my mother always told me, rana rana rana rana rana rana rana rana rana rana and codeine and / goddammit you little muthafucker if you ain't got nuthin' nice to say then don't say nuthin'.”
Courtesy of Eminem, ‘My Dad’s Gone Crazy’ from The Eminem Show

CURRENT FAVOURITE AUSTRALIAN POLITICIAN:
John Stanhope, Chief Minister of the ACT, where I happen to live. Currently attempting to push through a comprehensive law reform proposal to remove any discrimination from ACT legislation against gays, lesbians, bisexual, transgender and intersex people. Canberra is renowned in Australia for having legalised prostitution and pornography, and decriminalised marijuana for personal use. I think it would be great if it also had the most progressive laws regarding gender and sexuality. Hey Doug, do I get to be an honorary lesbian now?

FAVOURITE CELEBRITY WEBSITE:
Sir Ian Mckellan’s (a.k.a. Gandalf/Richard III/Magnito etc.) Homepage
Everything you ever wanted to know about The Lord of the Rings, Shakespeare on stage and screen, and gay activism. The guy just rawks.

FAVOURITE LORD OF THE RINGS RELATED WEBSITE:
The Lords of the Rhymes
Bombadil aka B-dil aka MC First and Fatherless has been dropping hobbit rhymes since naught but ents roamed the hills of middle-earth. That's right: sucker MCs, wargs and wildmen beware... Ol' Tom's older than your mama's mama's mama and he's got the song for you and yours.
What else can I say, except:
Elf booty got soul!
Elf girls like to rock’n’roll!

2003-02-25T15:47:00.000-08:00

Trust me, I'm stupid

I was, to my own surprise, intrigued by Shane Warne's admission last night that he has actually taken two of the banned diuretic tablets for which he has been suspended. While I admit to knowing very little about cricket (un-Australian of me I know), the whole thing raised some interesting points for me.

First was Warne's 'plead stupidity' angle. "Whether, rightly or wrongly mate, whether you hate me, you like me, you love the way I play or whatever, the facts of the matter are that I don't read much, I don't take a lot of interest in the outside world . . . I just play cricket," he said. That may well be, but I find it hard to believe that he was so narrow-mindedly focused on the game of cricket that he failed to register the fact that taking banned substances can be bad for your career, not to mention your health (drugs are bad mmkay?). I have known some elite-level athletes, and it would be hard to find a group of people more paranoid about what they put in their bodies. Forget banned drugs, most of them I've met have highly developed food paranoia of the sort only matched by chronic anorexics. Warne also seems to have missed the point that you sound more than a little stupid complaining about the unfairness of being suspended for taking a banned substance, at the same time as you are admitting to taking it more times than you have been busted for it.

The second thing that struck me was that apart from cricket, the thing that really seems to be occupying Shane Warne's mind is his own reflection. The banned tablets were (allegedly) taken to get rid of a double chin. We have now acheived such a high level of equality in our society that it is no longer just women who are possessed of crippling body image problems. Now men are surrounded by glossy magazines telling them why their appearance is so totally inadequate. And it seems that for people like Warne, sporting skills are not enough - you have to look good too.

I was also disturbed by the estimation that a one-year ban from cricket will cost Warne in the order of 2-3 million dollars. What kind of a world is it when, by his own admission doing nothing but play cricket is valued at 3 million dollars a year, compared to what we give people who, for example, search for a cure for cancer, devote their lives to battling human rights violations, etc. I mean, I know he plays cricket very well, but bloody hell.

Finally I was startled to note Warne's claim that he has been offered a cameo in a movie. God help us all.

2003-02-23T16:12:00.000-08:00

Next come the locusts

Really didn't want to get out of bed this morning, as I'm pretty tired after a little road trip with five friends. We spent the weekend at Jervis Bay - the first time in quite a while that I have been to the coast for more than a day. Of course, last time I went to the coast for the day, a substantial proportion of Canberra burned to the ground. This time, torrential rain and gale force winds caused havoc in NSW. Coincidence? I think not.

We drove down through the Kangaroo Valley, which was startlingly lush and green compared to much of the ACT and NSW. We went on a detour to the town of Berry, to drop in on a friend of one of the road-trippers, who runs an organic bakery. There are definately worse ways to be spending your life. I'm all in favour of having friends who do this sort of thing - it allows you to visit funky little towns and scam delicious fresh food. Anytime any of you want to try a career change and open a bakery, cafe, winery etc. I will definately be a regular visitor.

I was just glad to actually make it that far. As there were six of us we took two cars, and I was driving one of them. I didn't really know where we were going, so we agreed to go convoy-style. Somewhere past Lake George the lead car accelerated to something like 140 km/h and disappeared over the horizon. Some twenty minutes later my phone rang - "Ummm, we haven't actually seen you for a while. Are you OK?" Oh yes, just fine, chugging along somewhere in the vicinity of the speed limit. So where are we going again?

Any road trip requires good driving music - something with a good beat to keep you awake and alert. The driving music of choice this time was my rap/hip hop compilation, which starts off with the 8 Mile Sountrack before toning down and getting funky with the Black-Eyed Peas and US3. Yes, for two middle-class Australian women (one eurasian, one very white) we were probably enjoying some extremely dubious rap lyrics far too much, but it was fun anyway.

Naturally, being a rare weekend at the coast, it rained a lot. But it seems churlish in Australia's massive drought to complain about the rain. We went to Hyams Beach for a swim on Saturday anyway. According the the Guinness Book of Records it has the whitest sand in the world. The water was really warm too, barely different from the air temperature. Unfortunately the waves were really strong, so you couldn't go in too far. The good thing about a coast trip with friends though is that it needn't matter if the weather isn't cooperating - swimming; walks on the sand; frisbee on the beach; beer, fish and chips at the local pub; then back home for more alcohol and board games. A slow morning reading crappy magazines before hitting the beach again.

We got back into Canberra late yesterday afternoon, in time to go and see Tropfest. I was really glad that we made the effort to go, despite the driving-induced tiredness and the constant threat of rain, always a joy at an outdoor film festival. There was no way I was going to stay awake long enough for the judging though. Having read the announced winners this morning, I don't really agree with the judges' choice of Buried, but since I watched the films and am writing this in a tired haze, I don't really have a well formulated argument for an alternate choice. Suggestions are welcome.

2003-02-20T14:02:00.000-08:00

Computing for Dummies

When it comes to computers, my attitude is essentially that of Socrates – the only thing I know is that I know nothing.

Actually that is not quite true. I know a little bit, but I am very aware of my own ignorance. I’m good at figuring out the simple processes, and can find my way around those programs designed for people with basic computer literacy, but no real training. Bet you can tell that by looking at my blog.

I know how to fiddle around with programs until I figure things out. I also know when to leave things the hell alone and call in the experts, thus preventing me from pulling any spectacular FUBARs on my own equipment. I also know the value of a backup disk.

Still, despite my extremely elementary level of computing skills, I have somehow become the office ‘expert’ because of how much more I know than the other staff (although admittedly there are only 9 or 10 of them). And this is really quite frightening. I once thought that this was because of my age (see previous post on this subject), but even the young staff members have been coming up with some astonishing questions lately.

Below is a sample of the problems which have been brought to me just in the past week. My internal monologue is in italics (actually some of this I said out loud too), and the age of the person is given in brackets, because surely some of these people should know better.

SM (32): Marissa, I think this floppy disk you gave me is broken. It won’t save. Look – it just keeps saying ‘disk is write-protected’. What the hell does that mean?
M: Hmmmmm, well, let’s look at Mr Disk shall we? See this little black plastic tab? [Click] write-protect off [click] write-protect on [click] write-protect off . . . Magic!

SM (36) Marissa, can you install this program for me? I don’t know how.
M: Take installation disk. Put in computer. When installation program boots up, keep hitting the thing which says ‘Next’ until it isn’t there any more, which means it is time to click the thing which says ‘Finish’ instead.

SM (36) Marissa, I thought you said you saved those photos on the network drive for me. But my computer won’t open them, see?
M: Well, not if you try opening a jpg file with Microsoft Word, no. [What IS it with these people who think Word opens everything!]

SM (23) Marissa, can you open this Acrobat file for me? You have a much more updated version of Acrobat than I do.
M: Yes. Now, see this little picture on your screen which says ‘Download Adobe Acrobat’ . . .

I won’t even go into the night (approximately 7pm) I had to spend 30 minutes trying to explain how to use a scanner (Put document face-down on scanner. Press big, glowing button . . .). And all of these inane questions are happening while I’m busy trying to do my actual job – the one they pay me for. Sometimes I just really want to scream.

Of course, it is also possible that I am an impatient, unsympathetic, patronising bitch.

Nah, I didn’t think so either.

2003-02-18T14:14:00.000-08:00

Pick a woman, any woman

I have a confession to make.

Last night, for the first time in my life, I watched The Bachelor. Actually The Bachelor II – the first of a new series. There are so many things wrong with this program that I have no hope of doing the subject justice here, but I would like to make a couple of observations.

The first thing that struck me was the fact that everyone on the show was instantly recognisable as an American. And this is kind of strange when you think about it. There is no such thing as an ‘ethnic American’. Yet put any of these people with a group of others of the same ethnic background but different nationality, and you would instantly be able to pick the Americans. Whether it is all that cosmetic dental work, the hair, the body language, or some other indefinable element, something is instantly recognisable. Perhaps I should say they were instantly recognisable as a certain type of American – I realize that not all Americans look like that. Specifically I mean larger than life, huge toothy grins, and a certain plastic quality. Even the token Black and Asian girls looked, on some strange subconscious level, exactly like all the others. How The Bachelor in question (a pilot who looked like he was produced by Mattel) managed to tell them apart long enough to pick 15 from the initial 25 is a mystery to me.

The women were also all of another particular ‘type’. I used to think there were a lot of stereotypes of women that were just that – stereotypes. Surely there weren’t really people like that out there, or at least not more than a handful. Like the ‘Bridget Jones’ type, who actually knows the calorie content of every single thing she consumes. Or the woman who seriously believes in ‘The Rules’ - man ALWAYS pursues woman; only respond to one out of his four messages; "you must be a creature unlike any other" (What, a bizarre genetic mutation? And how can you be "unlike any other" if you are doing exactly the same thing as a bunch of other people reading this shit?). Or in this case, the ‘Muriel’ stereotype. The woman (or girl) who has been dreaming of her wedding day since she was 8 years old, and has a scrapbook full of dress designs, and cakes, and napkins, and has never thought of what happens the day after the wedding when you wake up next to some guy you have just vowed to (theoretically) spend the rest of your life with. Apparently all these types of women actually exist. Actually, judging from The Bachelor, there are a lot of women who are all those stereotypes at once.

There was the woman who said “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to be a wife, a mother, a lover. Whatever it takes.” You could almost hear the unspoken “Oh dear lord, pick me, pick me, PICK ME GOD DAMN IT!”

There was the woman who said “I’ve pretty much done everything I wanted to do. I’ve settled into my career. I have all my friends. Now I think it’s time for me to share my life with someone”. She was twenty-four. Anyone who has done everything they wanted to do with their life by the time they are twenty-four has neither imagination nor ambition.

I think some of these women would benefit from being allowed to just go out and blow thousands of dollars on a dress, a cake, and a big mother of a party. To have the world revolve around them for the day - that’s all they really seem to want from marriage.

Failing that a good smack in the face would work wonders.

2003-02-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

Polyester Girls (and Boys)

Interesting vignette in The Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend about the use of Botox injections by movie stars. Botox is popular with actors and models because it reduces the appearance of wrinkles. It does this by paralysing facial muscles. The casting director quoted in this article estimated that one-third of the actors he saw had used Botox. The idea of deliberately freezing your facial muscles in a desperate attempt to look younger is quite a frightening, reality-removed act, although not as bad as having a couple of ribs removed so you have a more dramatic waistline. Or the ability to give yourself a blowjob apparently. Anyway I was rather amused to read that directors and casting agents are weeding out actors who have had Botox injections. Why? Well funnily enough if you have just had all the muscles in your face paralysed, you tend to lose a lot of facial expression. And unless you are churning out B-grade skin flicks, having actors who have more than one facial expression tends to be a necessity. Presumably this is not an issue for models.

Speaking of people with plastic faces, another interesting SMH article today was on why it is that reality television has destroyed Michael Jackson’s reputation, but boosted Ozzy Osbourne’s. This is, after all, a man once famous for biting the head off a bat.

The bottom line seems to be that The Osbournes showed a family on one level deeply weird, but on another level very familiar and accessible. Whereas Living with Michael Jackson just proved how far off the planet we had always suspected him to be.

The Osbournes have problems that normal people don’t – sibling rivalry over Kelly’s musical career, Jack’s obsession with weapons, Ozzy’s shambling reign as the Prince of Darkness. But at the end of the day they aren’t that different to normal people. They shout at each other a lot, but also love each other to death. Ozzy’s very human reaction to his problems is to dive right into the chemical substances, be they alcoholic or prescribed anti-depressants.

On the other hand, Michael Jackson’s reaction to his inner turmoil is to completely rebuild his face into something from a Tim Burton movie, lock himself permanently in a theme park, and sleep with small children.

One of these approaches will win you sympathy, affection, and a certain amount of amused admiration. The other generates the sort of horrified fascination of a car crash, followed by a nasty taste in the mouth and the sudden urge to have a shower.

2003-02-13T17:32:00.000-08:00

Nah Bro, I’m a New Zealander eh

In these troubling times, with US citizens being told to prepare for the possibility of chemical and biological warfare with the aid of a roll of duct tape, a plastic shower curtain and a bar of soap, and Australians being told to prepare for terrorist attack with the aid of a fridge magnet, I thought it would be refreshing to take a glance across the Tasman at what our neighbours are saying.

Well, in a statement on 11 February, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clarke’s remarks included:
- “We do not support unilateral action against Iraq."
- New Zealand was seeking to uphold the principles of multilateralism, the international rule of law and the authority of the United Nations Security Council.
- If armed intervention was sanctioned by the Security Council, New Zealand would consider offering humanitarian, medical or logistical support, probably after the conflict had ended.

How cool is that? Apparently Iraq is just really not much of an issue for New Zealanders, apart from wondering what a bunch of other mad bastards are planning to do to each other.

I’m totally a fan of New Zealand right now. Not only does New Zealand have a female Prime Minister, a female Governor General, and a female Chief Justice, they also have the world’s first transsexual MP (The Hon. Georgina Beyer, a Maori ex-sex worker voted in by a largely white, rural electorate) and a Rastafarian MP. They care about the environment. They are nice to refugees. They make good wine. They got really, really excited about The Lord of the Rings.

This is a country where last year the Prime Minister said she was far too busy going to a meeting of left-leaning government leaders to be arsed to go back home just because the Queen was visiting, and that anyway it was patently ridiculous that England’s Queen was New Zealand’s Head of State. It was left to The Hon. Georgina to go meet the Queen at the airport instead.

New Zealand is a truly beautiful country (as you can see from my photo link), the people are really friendly (provided you are not arguing about rugby or cricket), unemployment is at 4.9%, and the NZ$ is currently worth A$0.93. The automatic right of residency that Australians have in New Zealand is starting to look really good right now.

2003-02-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

Old enough to be your daughter

I’ve been thinking about my age a bit lately. Not so much because of my birthday the other day, but more because of an incident the other day when a radio journalist said, no offence, but would it be OK if she interviewed my boss instead. This irritated my current supervisor far more than it personally offended me. I’ve pretty much gotten used to it by now. I was amused by the fact that it was a phone interview – if she was actually in a position to see that I am 5ft tall, freckled and in my mid-twenties, she would really have been disturbed. Anyway, having been in this job for four years now, I tend to forget the fact that I am relatively young, but once in a while something happens which reminds me.

When I first started in this job I was the youngest person in my office by 15 years. Admittedly it is a small office, so that’s probably not statistically significant. I should also note that the fact that I am relatively young has nothing to do with any prodigious talent on my part, and more to do with the fact that, unlike many of my friends, I only did one degree, and didn’t take a year or two off to travel. I am often in meetings or workshops where the average age of participants is roughly 15-20 years older than me, and where many people are quite a bit older than that. I am used to a look of faint amusement on people’s faces as they contemplate my age relative to that of their children.

Most of the time this is not a problem, as once people stop thinking about it and let me get on with the job, they also seem to be able to forget how old I am. Or am not, as the case may be. Some people still have some credibility issues though. Yes, I am quite short. Yes, I have freckles, and dimples. Yes, I am younger than your children. No, I don’t give a shit. Deal with it.

Anyway, I have definitive proof that, whatever some people think, I am getting old. Not because of my birthday, not because of the occasional grey hair, not because my boss told this journalist that conducting interviews was my job and they could deal with it or piss off. No, I am provably old because of the effort it took to get out of bed this morning and go to work, having been convinced last night that staying up late and getting drunk with my currently unemployed housemate was a good idea. I REALLY feel old this morning.

2003-02-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

Because I said so

The other day I was having an argument with a friend of mine. By argument, I mean a spirited, loudly defended, but always entirely friendly debate, as opposed to an ‘I hate you, I hate you’ sort of an argument. The actual subject of the argument is unimportant, one of many disagreements we have had over the years, mostly in order to pass the time. And wind each other up. What is important is the fact that, once again, I lost.

Not that he convinced me that he was right and I was wrong, but in the sense that, according to the rules of rational debate, he was way ahead on points. The panel of invisible judges ruled against me.

The problem I always come up against is the fact that he is so much more logical than I am. It is not that I am entirely without logic, or incapable of understanding it. I just don’t happen to think that it is the only valid method of approaching a particular subject. At least not one that concerns people. People contain far too many tangled social and personal histories, knotted neural pathways, and fluctuating waves of chemicals (both natural and artificial) to react entirely logically. You can accept the perfect logic and reason of a situation in one corner of your head, while every other fibre of your being is simultaneously screaming out to start throwing things. Or at least I can. [Hmmm, this may be the core of the problem. This is certainly not disproving our latest argument.]

In a society in which science and reason are the core of the dominant paradigm, it is not too difficult to defeat an emotive or intuitive argument with a logical one, but it is very difficult to defeat a logical argument with emotion or intuition. Because it begins to sound alarmingly like the sort of debate small children have with their parents, which degenerate into ‘because I said so’ or ‘because it just is.’ Or worse, the sort of argument which falls back on ‘because God says so’ or ‘because mercury is in the ascendant this month.’ I would like there to be a valid form of debate that acknowledges the often illogical and impulse driven nature of most human beings. Maybe it is only because, just once, I would like to win. I realise that this is probably buying into some dodgy, overly polarised, artificially competitive, unenlightened worldview. I don’t care. Because if there is one thing he does better than carry out a logical debate, it is gloat. Damn that’s annoying.

2003-02-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

In the beginning . . .

When I was two or three years old my aunt gave me a stuffed toy cow. I named it, with the creative flair of a toddler, Moo Cow. Apparently I was quite obsessed with Moo Cow, and took it everywhere. Those who went to my 21st birthday party will be aware that Moo Cow survives to this day, currently in quiet retirement in a cupboard in my parents’ garage. My obsession with Moo Cow led my older brother to give me the nickname Moo, and as a family nickname it has stuck ever since. [I might say at this point that having tried most of my life to restrict the usage of ‘Moo’ to my immediate family, it seems a bit silly to post it on the Internet. On the other hand, ‘I had a cute childhood nickname’ is hardly going to rate as the most sensitive piece of personal information every revealed online. But I digress.] As a pre-teen I once asked my brother why he had named me Moo. He responded, with the charm of an older brother, something along the lines of “Well, because you’re a cow. And you’re always mooing on about something.” Setting aside the character assassination, he may have had a point. Because some twenty-four years after Moo Cow first entered my life, I have succumbed to the temptation to blog. Why? Because now I have a place where I can moo on about whatever the hell I like. You are welcome to come visit and chew the cud.