... just another day

hi y'all, well, just another day in sunny portland... except it wasn't actually that sunny today. it was actually pretty overcast for most of the day, which means that, as per usual, chances are i'll be quite sunburnt. i know, i know... why do you go out walking without a hat if you know you're still going to get sunburnt anyway? i don't know. no, wait, hang on, i think i do know. i am a lazyarse, that'd be it! and i'm very much enjoying the sun! who knows? maybe my arm-tan-lines will be back up to aussie summer standard? perhaps...

i did quite a bit of walking around today. i caught the 14 bus into town, changed to the 9, went up to union station to the amtrak counter to buy my tickets for my side-trip to astoria. i'm almost starting to wish i hadn't decided to go there, simply because of the pain it's going to be schlepping my stuff hither and yon over the next week. i've also been told to go visit long view, washington, which is just across the bridge from astoria and which i've been assured i can get to via a regular service across that bridge. i'm not ecstatically interested in doing that so i haven't really looked into it at this end - i figure that when i get to astoria i'll check it out there.

so after i bought my tickets i walked north to the broadway bridge. it's one of the many bridges here in portland, a town famous for its many bridges, each one unique in its own special way. i'd love to take some photos of those bridges that move to accommodate riverine traffic but i can't be bothered checking with the appropriate authorities for vessel piloting times. if it happens, it happens. i had planned to walk back over the fremont bridge but it didn't have any pedestrian access that i could find. i already knew that it was closed to bicycle traffic, so maybe it was a bit of a pipe dream that i'd be able to walk it. the st john's bridge is further north up the willamette but i'm in two minds about going over that. i've a sneaking suspicion that it may be more trouble than it's worth simply to get there.

i did take some photos from the broadway bridge (it's painted the same colour as the golden gate bridge, called both "golden gate red" and "international orange", or so i've been given to believe), one of the fremont bridge and one of the steel bridge, which i will try to walk across at some other time.

while i was in north portland i had lunch at a yummy pub-place called the gotham tavern; delicious food, yummy beer (i had a "liberty ale" by a brewing company in san francisco called anchor brewing), great atmosphere, wonderfully relaxing in the early afternoon. i decided instead of walking the fremont bridge to find a place called "liberty hall", where once microcosm publishing (see link adjacent) had their digs. the place was locked up tight as a drum when i went past, else i would've stuck my head in. i was starting to feel a bit tired or i might have walked into ne portland to try to find the statues of the ramona characters. going to church the other day, i did go past klickitat street, featured as the home of beezus and ramona from the beverly cleary novels (very popular when i was in primary school oh so any years ago!) there is a park in northeast that has these statues and that is a destination for me.

so instead of doing that, i caught the bus back into the city, connected to the 14, and arrived on hawthorne blvd early enough to go to the bagdad to see x-men origins: wolverine. it wasn't bad, cheesey continuity stuff aside, and i was glad they ended it in japan (post credits). i was less impressed with their rejuvenated professor x (it looked ridiculous in x-men: the last stand so why repeat it here?) and i thought that ryan reynolds was utterly wasted as deadpool. danny huston did a good job as william stryker but i have trouble imagining him ageing into brian cox. look out for max cullen and julia blake! it was turning into spot-the-australian-actor for a while there. i liked the guy who played agent zero - i think that tim kang (the actor playing kimball cho in the mentalist) would have been equally good or better as zero.

when that was over, i went downstairs and enjoyed breadsticks (purportedly with a garlic-herb butter but not that i could really taste) and a glass of porter. since trying (and thoroughy enjoying) the james squires porter, i've been trying other dark beers as the opportunity arises. i've been known to enjoy a guinness now and then but here in portland there are quite a few microbreweries making porter and i'm very much enjoying trying them out. the black rabbit porter was nice enough, better with the breadsticks, had a thick, loamy taste that i wasn't a huge fan of with a mouthful of fruit at the end (which i really didn't like and which the breadsticks quite put paid to). not that i feel i'm becoming a connoisseur but i want to be able to articulate what i like. or not.

i finished the porter in time to go into the next movie, drag me to hell. sam raimi returns to his roots with a simple tale, simply told, or a good girl who does one wrong thing. typically, at least in horror movies since about the mid-70s, the good girl gets the bullseye painted on her back by sleeping with her boyfriend - in this film, she's already living with her boyfriend, brilliantly underplayed by justin long in a role he truly could have hammed up to the max. no, in this movie she gives it up for her boss, a small-town/suburban bank manager played by david paymer (also brilliantly subdued), by going against her gut instincts, being hardnosed with an elderly mortgagee and foreclosing on her house. the woman turns out to be a gypsy - curses her - and so the story unfolds.

i loved the attention to detail that raimi takes with this movie. it's nothing spectacular but if it had gone straight to dvd it might easily have slipped through the cracks. the only personal touch missing was the lack of bruce campbell - although sam's brother ted has a barely-visible-but-you-know-that-voice-anywhere cameo - but i think that the subdued acting (in contrast to the action) would have been hard for campbell to live down to. i found the special effects to feel low on CGI use, giving the impression of effects that one might have seen in a b-movie horror, lots of shadows, creaking doors, wind effects, jump-cut close-ups. the make-up effects are great. i think the lack of name-stars gives the film a cachet and an integrity that bigger celebrity actors would have detracted from and this will yield more enjoyent over successive viewings. i didn't think much of it five minutes later but i walked out two hours ago and i'm enjoying it even more now. alas, i predicted the ending.

one postcard down, four to go, plus a letter. oh yes! i also visited the post office. very friendly. maybe i got them on a good day. who knows?

i'm planning on doing washing tomorrow night, which gives me an extra day to do it if it turns out that i can't do washing tomorrow night. i might just take a book into town tomorrow and find somewhere to sit and read. maybe finish that obama book or read the mary guterson one.

oh, hey! she visited my blog and commented on my post! i couldn't think of how she found it but i realised that she must simply have googled herself and looked for what came up as recent. (i might go try that now... cool - i googled "mary guterson"+powell's+reading and came up on the second page...) there you go. cool.

well, i have a couple of other emails to send, then off to bed. good night!

... quieter day

well, i was up bright and early today, had a delicious breakfast of home fries and scrambled eggs with rye toast and a not bad cup of coffee. then i took the magical mystery tour to the middle-deep of south-east portland, meeting up with a bus to take me to the middle-deep of north-east portland, where i'd decided to go to church.

church was okay. i think i knew two of the tunes (one being for the threefold amen!) and i wasn't singled out and welcomed, which i felt was nice. discretion can be the better part of hospitality too! through the summer (not that you'd necessarily know it - it's cool and wet today with a forecast top of 21c(71f) and right now i think it's only about 18, if that, so i'm pretty comfortable!) the church has lunch between services, bringing the evening service forward to mid-afternoon so people are, i suppose, freed up to do other things for the rest of the day after spending a bunch of time together through the middle of the day. i won't be there next sunday (since i'll be in astoria) but i plan to visit there again in two weeks' time.

i've not made plans for tomorrow but i think i might just bum around the city, park my butt in a cafe somewhere and just write. which was kind of an overall plan anyway.

... quiet day

today was pretty quiet. i didn't get up as late as i did yesterday but i still didn't leave until very late - about 2-ish. made a few stops worth mentioning.

i went to the markets at burnside bridge. they're pretty glebe-y actually, and as far as handicrafts go it's all pretty slick, pretty professional. not overly crafty, per se. one thing i did get, however, that i thought was pretty cool was a game that some guy had made that he called "the real game of life". if you remember the boardgame that had the little built-in spinner, with the little cars for tokens, and tiny little pegs for people in them, this game has a slightly different take on how you win. in this new game you accrue "happiness" points through the various events that occur as you progress along life's pathways. the winner is the one with the most happiness points at the end of the game. different kind of money but still a matter of the most toys, i guess.

i checked off one of my big to-do list items, to set a copy of season 2 of once and again, my favourite tv (melo)drama series. i won't be able to get season 3 until the studios bring it to dvd, which doesn't appear to be on the cards anytime soon, alas. tough luck, i'll live. i signed an online petition to get season 3 released on dvd. what else can i do?

one of the funkiest things i've found, which i think i might have seen at a bookshop at the international terminal in melbourne, is a book called, pride and prejudice and zombies. the opening line reads something like:

it is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must want more brains...

elizabeth bennett's father wants a husband who will be able to protect his child from the unmentionable menace overrunning regency england. i'm trying very hard not to buy it here - i've only been here a few days and already i'll be carting around more than i should be.

church tomorrow. it's just coming up to 10.30pm now and i'm going to sign off and go to bed. i'm visiting the first orthodox presbyterian church of portland, which i picked after googling a bunch of churches here and checking out their websites. i don't know if i'll visit twice but we'll see.

i'm also going to see about booking my ticket to astoria. i'm taking an amtrak bus, so i'm going to head into union station in the north-east section of the city and check it out and if i'm able to buy my tickets i'll do it then. trying on a sunday is my only concern that i might come a cropper there but, again, we'll see.

good night...

... the world is an amazing place

i did an awful lot of walking yesterday. I was up at about 12.30, had a shower, got changed and motored out up the road to safeway. i couldn't believe it – i haven't seen the safeway sign like that for about 30 years, not since safeway in crown central closed and it was replaced by best & less and the other specialty shops opening up to the stairs leading to keira street... the supermarket itself was pretty huge and i bought some cheese and some granola (mueseli) bars and some grapefruit/cranberry juice (that was just delicious!).

it was a good way to eat breakfast, munching a bit here and there, because i walked from the hostel to the cbd. took quite a while, it was something like thirty city blocks to get to the willamette river, then more once i crossed hawthorne bridge. i'm planning on taking photos of these bridges at some point. i'm getting better at looking left before i cross the road but i've made a deliberate effort to use the footpaths on the left hand side of the road, so i'm usually facing the oncoming traffic. that being said, it's not going to help me learn to look left.

portland is an interesting city. for all the friendliness i was expecting, it's not that friendly. i smile at people as i walk around (feeling a tad like the village idiot, mind you) and get a few smiles back but not as many as i do walking around melbourne. once you engage people in conversation that sense evaporates and everyone that i've spoken with had been very friendly. there is quite a mix of affluence and poverty here – i've seen lot of panhandlers and homeless people sleeping in doorways and whatnot. i've also seen a couple of people using building fire escape doors as urinals. that's a bit ordinary but it seems to be happening more and more these days, home in melbourne too. as i walked through the city i did see quite a lot of empty shopfronts, which made me feel as if i were newcastle. when i went to tina last year, newcastle surprised me by being so... half empty. that's how it felt – half empty, not half-full. portland feels half-full, as if there's even more that could be happening. the owner of counter media, a shop near reading frenzy, told me that he works six days a week and has one member of staff to open the other day. he used to have two staff members and his last holiday was a three-day break a couple of years ago but the times have required a tightening of the belt, which at the moment remains quite tight.

transport here is great. similar to melbourne, transit ticketing seems to be based on travelling within certain zones situated concentrically around the cbd. i bought a weekly ticket for all zones and it wasn't very much, only about $20 or so. for the freedom to jump on any bus or train or streetcar or max train, it's abbasolutely worth it. portland is also incredibly bike friendly. walking into downtown yesterday i saw bucketloads of people riding their bikes into town and not many wearing helmets, although coming home almost everyone was. i don't know what that means. there are a lot of mass biking events and the portland police have apparently come down hard on some cyclists in the last but now i'm told that as long as you're wearing your helmet and have the appropriate lights on your bike, they leave you alone.

something i did notice yesterday but don't seem to see much today was all this fluff that was floating in the air. i was fronted by a volunteer collecting for a charity who, after i declined to sign up but kept yakking anyway, told me that it was a real allergy-starter. i had coffee at a place opposite a park in the city with a wwii cenotaph and the barista informed me that the fluff was most like cottonwood and/or poplar seeds, similar to dandelion seeds. i wonder how much of it i breathed in yesterday without realising...

one of my visits last night was to powell's city of books. as i browsed the shelves, i heard an announcement for a book signing and reading by author mary guterson. i didn't know her from a bar of soap but i was already in the store and i figured, why not? she seemed quite genial, the excerpts that she read were entertaining enough, so i bought a book, had it autographed, and i might read it on the plane on the way home. the book is called gone to the dogs. I browsed through the teen/young adult fiction while i was in-store – two authors stood out, the aussie author max barry and his book jennifer government (which i think we have at work) and an author named john green whose book, an abundance of katherines, sounded entertaining just from the title.

i got home quite late, after eating a couple of delcious cheeseburgers at a food cart in the downtown area where they were showing an outdoor screening of indiana jones and the last crusade. after a few false starts finding a bus stop, i caught the 14 back to the hostel and despite my good intentions of going straight to bed i stayed up talking with a couple of other guests – claire, who's up from california scoping out the lie of the land in anticipation of relocation; chris, a guy from perth who's been living in seattle these last three years; rhoda, chris' girlfriend, who sounded like a seattle native. all very friendly. but i did get up a couple of hours earlier today, which is nice.

today i've intentions of visiting the markets under the burnside bridge, the iprc, and maybe have dinner at one of the local places near the hostel. tonight i go to bed before 11pm! (my grand plan.)

something i came up with while discussing cats yesterday – cats are looking at humans and thinking, if only i had a thumb i could kill them in their sleep! not necessarily true, though. my theory is that they're waiting for humans to invent robots programmed to feed cats (from catching fish to canning, to serving on cats' dishes), at which point the feline revolution will overthrow humans. coming, but not yet...

well, it feels like it could be true.

... on deck in portland

after almost 27 hours of travelling, here i am. interesting people. i'm in a co-ed dorm. it's warmer than i expected but there's an almost constant cool breeze. i kept running into some fellow travellers - one billy-crystalesque guy visiting relatives in new york; one woman visiting relatives in las vegas; one woman, who turned out to be a flight attendant for a rival carrier trying to get home to indianapolis. (i hope she made it.)

clearing customs in san francisco wasn't too much of a trial but perhaps it was because i was one of the first people to check my luggage at the airport in melbourne (arrived about ten to eight - great going allison!) that i ended up being one of the last to get my luggage at sfo. i had planned to have plenty of time between drinks at san francisco, so i wasn't worried about time. i had southwestern corn chowder in a sourdough loaf-bowl for lunch, which was nice. the area i was sitting in was very interesting - a large open space with a high, almost vaulted ceiling, with a big octagonal ceiling formation of windows to make a giant skylight. very pretty.

they also had a bunch of exhibits featuring the work of two designers from the 50s, mary and russel wright. very interesting stuff! i noticed many people on their way to their departure gates being distracted by the big glass boxes featuring items designed at a broad range of stages in their careers. i have the feeling that their book, originally published in 1950 and reprinted in 2003, somewhat precursored the ikea catalogue i love so much.

the flight was a bit weird, though. i felt like i was in a movie marathon with really loud air conditioning... and a very small screen... and very bodgy editing and bleeping. saw the pink panther 2, confessions of a shopaholic, duplicity and 17 again. to borrow a phrase all pretty craptastic, actually. shopaholic was probably the best and only because it tugged at the heartstrings none too subtly but that's ok with me. isla fisher pretty fun to watch (see definitely, maybe) but the lead male (hugh dancy) was also seen recently in the jane austen book cub and did a very competent job with a fairly lean role.

i'm really tired. i'm going to just duck out and organise brekkie for tomorrow, i think, and maybe then come back here, read for bit, and hit the sack. i'm reading barack obama's book, dreams from my father - very easy to read and written (if he proves as good as his election word, i suppose) from the heart. he wrote this after he'd been elected president of the harvard law review. worth look.

plans for tomorrow are still a bit sketchy. i think i'll most likely wander around downtown nd suss out places like the iprc (independent publishing resource centre), reading frenzy, powell's books, etc.

bye from pdx!

... you could put a tail on it and call it "weasel"

i have a cunning and subtle plan, my lords and ladies. this time tomorrow i should be well and truly on my way to the u.s. via sydney and san francisco - to portland, oregon. home of zines, city of roses, whose name was decided upon by the flip of a coin - birthplace of such characters as henry huggins and beezus & ramona, bands like everclear and sleater-kinney, home of myriad cafes, microbreweries and bridges. (i'm also planning to visit astoria.)

my intention is to blog daily about what i've done and sketch my plans for the following/upcoming day. this is partly to allay any fears my family have of me disappearing in a puff of smoke on the far side of the world. partly because it's probably not a bad thing to do and good writing discipline. partly because such an activity will give each day of mine something to hand from, i suppose. we'll see. i've blogged daily before and i don't remember the posts towards the end being anything spectacular.

right now, i'm finishing up lunch, finishing receiving in some stock, and tidying up my desk. wish me luck. pray for my safety and thank God for the safe arrival of my friends' newest child, henry.

please note a new link to a musical podcast/blog series off to the right, cassettes and chocolate milk. it's deff triff! music i haven't heard in ages, or had forgotten about, or never heard before, all put together by my friend eleanor.

... ghosts of farscape past

i miss farscape... i was watching the last episodes of it today and there was footage of producer david kemper reading comments from tv guide - i'll repeat them here:

we didn't do anything wrong. we did a great job, and they cut us off before we finished telling the story. and i've talked to a lot of people, and andrew, and ben, and the big regret is: we didn't get to finish the story, and we all know that the house is like eighty percent painted... but we didn't screw up.

now, for those of you who know who matt roush is - he's the influential tv critic for tv guide, the biggest magazine of its kind in the states - he's been our supporter, and, uh, he called me last night about three in the morning, while i was writing the crap that went on over there. and he wanted an interview for the next magazine. and after we talked, this is what he wrote on-line. (he brings the piece of paper up to read it) and i think some portion of this will end up in the magazine. he wants to talk again tonight.

whew. "moya..." this, this, again, this is the guy... "moya no more . i couldn't be more disappointed to hear that scifi has opted not to support a fifth season of its signature series, farscape. since its unexpected and unheralded arrival in march, 1999, this lavishly produced space adventure quickly established itself as the most irreverent, unpredictable, sexy, intelligent, and exciting sci-fi show on tv. by comparison, enterprise is a lumbering dinosaur.

"ben browder and claudia black have incredible chemistry, and are surrounded by some of the most vivid and compelling fantasy creatures ever created. farscape is a joy to watch, and i've always been puzzled by why its rabidly loyal audience hasn't swelled in numbers each season. the show requires attention to be paid. maybe it's too much tv for some people. but the rewards are great. meanwhile, an inert movie like the latest blah star wars epic rakes in the bucks for no discernable reason i can think of except for genre fans' lemming-like devotion.

"for scifi to cite economic reasons for denying fans a final year of farscape would seem to be at odds with the network's mission as an entertainment brand. this decision is likely to be compared, years from now, to nbc's short-sighted cancellation of the original star trek."

this was made in australia by australians. this is the best science fiction show that's ever been made for television. you guys are great.

i miss farscape.

... coming home after watching transformers 2

i feel as though i should feel colder than i do. the night is clear and crisp, the stars shining through scattered rags of cloud suspended high in the sky, though not so high that they escape the illumination of the gradually sleeping city below them. am i warm from walking home from the tram stop so swiftly? warmed by adrenaline the way i read once that you can be, before the onset of hypothermia? or maybe simply warmed by the exertion of stalking the two hundred-odd metres from the tram stop to my front gate, stalking with that swift step that comes from the excitement of the movie you just watched the end credits roll for, or the song that just finished playing through your earphones, or the book you just slipped the old receipt into, breaking the action the way you wish television networks would learn to break the action of the movies they broadcast?

my nose isn't sniffly with the cold, there's no drip, though there was one before earlier in the day, in warmer environs than these, the front yard at my latest rented abode. i feel no itch in my throat, no cough expectantly expecting expectoration, though the dust that accumulates on every retailer's shelves teased out a stunning staccato when i returned to work after lunch. one single defiant sneeze, as if to say my cold would not be sneezed at.

it's a beautiful night outside. i felt i could have walked much further than i needed to but i think that that feeling was half-predicated on knowing that home was so close by. stopping by woods on a snowy evening, robert frost said what i think i may be feeling:

whose woods these are i think i know,
his house is in the village though.
he will not see me stopping here,
to watch his woods fill up with snow.

my little horse must think it queer,
to stop without a farmhouse near,
between the woods and frozen lake,
the darkest evening of the year.

he gives his harness bells a shake,
to ask if there is some mistake.
the only other sound's the sweep,
of easy wind and downy flake.

the woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but i have promises to keep,
and miles to go before i sleep,
and miles to go before i sleep.

... not long now!

my holiday to oregon is rapidly approaching and there is now less time until i leave than there will be time that i'm away! (if that makes sense.) i'll be in portland for two weeks with a break in the middle where i intend to be in astoria. i've also been playing around with checking out vancouver (washington state, just across the columbia river from portland), a place i know nothing else about besides its proximity to my main destination. i thought about going to forks but it looks like such a long way from portland (i think it was right up near the border with canada) so my twilight pilgrimage will have to wait.

work is great. i've definitely fallen on my feet here and it's hard to believe that i've already been here for nine months now! i feel like i'm a useful member of staff that may be missed while i'm gone on holidays, which is not a bad thing to feel, i think.

i gave a short talk at a men's breakfast on saturday. not very long, five minutes or so - i actually made a little a7-size zine to use as my notes! - and it seemed to go ok. generated some good conversation afterwards, which is nice.

still trying to get to see state of play - hopefully i'll be able to see it before I go away. (who knows what i'll see on the plane to sf/pdx?)

... sidney nolan

i was channel-surfing after the end of law & order: criminal intent tonight and i hit upon a documentary about sidney nolan. i really don't know much about the man, aside from the iconic paintings of ned kelly, but i learned one or two interesting tidbits. chief among these was that he died on my eighteenth birthday.

he had a rich and varied life. he was a painter from a ridiculously early age - wiki has him working on advertising displays with spray paints during the mid- to late-1930s - and went through periods of intense absorption of his surroundings and experiences which later translated in intense bursts of creativity. one person interviewed in the documentary said something about some flak that nolan faced for spending seemingly so little time on his work, capable of producing three or four paintings in only one morning. he'd made a comment to nolan who (typically having an answer for everything) said something along the lines of "five years thinking about it, half an hour painting it".

his personal life was something of a disaster area (a wife, child until an open and marriage-rending affair with sunday reed, during which time he created the kelly series of paintings) it seems until he married cynthia reed in 1948. the two sounded like they were great for each other and they travelled the world, he becoming quite the internationalist artist, seeking to become a world-citizen, while cynthia wrote constantly, producing several books of memoirs of their lives together. she died in 1976 and her daughter jinx, nolan's step-daughter, remarked that "he didn't mourn her... no, i don't mean that, that sounds terrible... i mean that he simply... closed a door. he closed the door on that part of his life, on those feelings..." (or words to that effect). in 1978 he married mary boyd, with whom he remained happily married until his death... on my 18th birthday.

my birthday in 1992 was a little less than a week after my end-of-school exams. i was thinking of little besides Christmas, a new year's eve party in sydney, then flying to china for two weeks' holidays before uni began in late february. i certainly wasn't thinking about this man who'd led such an (apparently) interesting and full life, of travel, of creativity, of reckless and feckless disregard, and of passionate commitment to his craft. he seemed to want to suck the marrow out of life and wasn't content to wait for the body to be carved up first. i didn't have the words then for what i wanted from life - i thought i knew what i wanted but that turned out to be not so.

"a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou" - i don't need a car or mortgage or ladder-climbing career for these things. i do know that, for a Christian, they are both too much and not enough. in the bewildering array of life goals in the world today, mine barely rate, which might uncharitably be called the end result of western consumerist apathy and human selfishness. i know how much my selfish wants loom large, interfering in my relationship with God - i am not separated by miles and time from God, i so often simply have my back to him.

argh.

... finally (argh)

well, i downloaded my recording and had a listen to it and was pretty surprised that i couldn't really spot the moment where i started speaking too quickly. please have a listen. i'd love feedback - emailed or posted, i don't mind which.

thanks again to all for their prayers and words of enouragement while i was preparing this. i was wearing brown trousers the whole week, however much it was warranted. i'm sure it'll be easier to prepare in the future, if i do preach again in the future, but to be honest i want to stay nauseatingly nervous. i'd be worried if i was feeling confident in myself. better i be confident in the Word i'm preaching from than in the words i choose to say.

after a day spent mostly in bed nursing a nasty migraine, it's ironic (or typical?) that i should be posting this after 11pm!

... call me eddie murphy

i'm coming to america! yay, i bought my ticket to portland yesterday and i'm really looking forward to july.

(omg - i've got rage playing in the background here this morning and kate bush is on!!! singing babooshka!!! - i haven't seen that film clip for about a million years - probably on countdown when molly meldrum was still hosting it back in the early 80s? - wow... rage is playing some awesome 80s-90s music this morning... two versions of bizarre love triangle and now moloko, the time is now)

anyway, portland zine symposium, here i come!

... awww...

i don't generally post a lot of videos but i was thinking about what makes me go, "awww..." today and this ad always puts a smile on my face:



before this one, my favourite advert was the "falling in lamb" commercial (this is the long version! can you believe they made two and i only ever saw the 45-second version up until now?):



how could you see these ads and not love them?

... afters

funny old week, feels like thursday already but it's only wednesday. not sure what to make of that.

uncle kevin's come through, so now i'm waiting for my next non-rent pay period to roll through so i can buy my tickets to portland. i've made contact with some people there, zinesters and hostel staff and others, so when i arrive i'll hopefully have some local knowledge bwanas to show me around. i have a bit of a shopping list of places i'd like to see, mostly taken from the zinester's guide to portland, but we'll see what happens.

... a(rg)h...

ahhh... that is the sigh of relief. of course the whole thing wasn't as scary as i expected but you can only know that after the fact.

it was recorded and once i have the .mp3, i'll be able to pass it on to whoever wants it. i didn't notice anyone nodding off and i did my best to make eye contact as much as possible throughout. didn't speak too quickly until about the beginning of the last third but i did notice and managed to rein it in. i gather that i was otherwise clear and measured throughout - i'll be interested to listen to myself and hear what it's like.

positive feedback from all. i hope i don't get tapped for this kind of thing again any time soon.

thanks so much for everyone who has been praying for me over this last week (and beforehand, of course, but especially since i was asked to preach tonight). thanks especially to two friends, one of whom jumped on a train yesterday to be at church today to listen to me, and who will be back on the way home tomorrow.

i stand by my argh. i've slept poorly this last week and been extremely anxious to do a good job. God alone knows the value of this offering - I only hope it's pleasing to him. one day maybe i'll say ahhh. until then...

by the way, i think this is my 200th post.

... 19 hours and counting...ish

it's done. printed, put in a display book.

i'm off to bed, i'll read it again a couple of times in the morning and a couple more in the afternoon.

... 21 hours and counting

in the throes of my third draft for this sunday. i've pared stuff down a bit further and beefed up some other bits.

read the second draft to myself this morning and it only took about fifteen minutes. read more slowly in front of people that would have been maybe about twenty, so i expect this last draft to be delivered in about 10-15 minutes.

it'd be nice to get some sleep tonight. i've not been sleeping well since last sunday. maybe i'll sleep better after tomorrow...

... 51 hours and counting

argh!

i got feedback today that was very encouraging. i'm going to go out for dinner tonight and relax a bit and the rest of the weekend will be taken up with laundry and sermon refinement.

later folks!

... update

draft number 2 is done and emailed to the guy who's been helping me out with this sermon. i was planning to have an early night tonight, but beauty and the geek is on in the background as i write this. hopefully, when i publish this post, i'll just go straight to bed.

i don't know. thank you all so much for praying for me. it's good to know and i truly believe i've already seen some of the fruits of that prayer support already. i think the sermon will be about twenty minutes... i'm sure it'll be pruned down and i just don't want to talk too fast! argh!

argh...

... we have progress

still wearing brown trousers but i've done a first draft and forwarded it along to be looked at by my assigned... coach? whatever. one of the guys from church is having a look at it. depending on feedback there i may also pass it along to my minister or go over it again and then bounce it back. argh.

i'd feel a bit less frazzled with more time to prepare but in a way it's good: i've only got a short space of time to have my nerves fried - any longer and i might really go berko. i don't think i'll be able to build up enough of a head of steam to go berko over this. argh.

argh.

... honest to blog

after commenting to a friend that not really enough was happening in my life to blog about, i have some news: i will be preaching a sermon this sunday at my church!

i'll be considering john 1:1-5. i was up very late last night thinking about it, reading through books i have and comparing different versions of the Bible to see how it's translated. hopefully i'll be able to bring out one or two points that will link last week's passage (on the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in john 20) and next week's passage (genesis 1, first in an 8-week series on genesis 1-3). something that stood out for me last night was john "why" for writing his gospel:

now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. - [john 20:30-31, esv]

i guess we'll see how i go.

i'd really appreciate prayer for this endeavour. i was only asked to do this yesterday and had only a few hours to consider my answer but who knows if this might not be God asking me to step up and try something i've not done before? i've given talks and run small groups for a long time and perhaps this is a chance to exercise a nascent spiritual gift i didn't know i had.

plus, i'm very scared. i want to do a good job.

... thoughts on moving house

i hate moving house. i've done it a few times now but i think i can solidly say that i hate moving house.

as an aside, i saw watchmen at the pictures last night. two thumbs up. i thought it was a more powerful story than v for vendetta but for contemporary audiences i think it's less accessible than v.

i've heard rumours that there's a movie version of shazam in the works. if that's so then i'm intrigued that such a dark and morally/ethically murky story like watchmen could be followed up with a film about a character like captain marvel, whose heart is the purest of any character in the dc comics (and probably marvel) universe(s).

... let's have a meeting in a brewery...

... and another thing i was thinking was this:

i received a letter from citicorp the other day. not me, actually, it wasn't addressed to me personally but i figured, "i'm the householder, i guess i can open it..." guess what it was offering?

yep. a credit card.

i hardly trust myself with money i have, let alone money i don't have. if i may paraphrase groucho marx, i wouldn't want a credit card from a corporation that would give me one.

surely, at least in australia (where statistically i feel like i have more personal credit card debt than i'm ever likely to pay back, even though i have no credit card of my own), it might be considered reckless endangerment to be giving anyone any kind of encouragement to engage in further credit card use.

i know, i know - credit cards can actually be a strong and positive force for wise and productive use of money in modern society. of course, that would be why there's a global credit crisis, wouldn't it? because obviously we're all being so wise and productive in our use of credit cards.

using credit cards isn't even using money. using credit cards is promising to use money to pay the debt incurred by using the credit card. using money is taking cash from your wallet, which you earned through your mode of employment or received as some form of allowance or stipend, and giving said money to (or maybe - if we're really stretching it - using an eftpos transaction with) another individual or business in exchange for goods and/or services. well, actually, that's spending money. you could use money for all kinds of things... lighting cigars, chocking a table leg to level a wobbling table, marking a place in a book, fertilising your orchids...

i think sending applications for credit cards to australians is like advertising an alcoholics anonymous meeting in a brewery.

... bet you didn't expect to read this...

i've been taking salsa dancing lessons. don't get excited, thinking i'm going to burn up the dance floor at your next formal event - i'm looking at it more in terms of a growing experience. apparently the instructor believes that i have a good sense of rhythm and if i can relax more, my instincts for the mechanics of the movements will stand me in good stead learning the dance moves.

hmmm...

in other news, i see that bonds and king gee are moving 1800-odd jobs offshore. that, to me, in these hard economic times seems, on the one hand, to be shrewd business sense. on the other hand, it does seem to be the kind of business practice that will harm australia as a whole, certainly in the short term and probably in the long term.

call me crazy but putting almost two thousand people out of work must be tantamount to commercial terrorism, don't you think? if a drunk person were to drive their car into someone's house and in doing so caused a fire that burned the house down, wouldn't they be held accountable? so how can a business in cold, sober deliberation, effectively set a match to almost 2000 people's lives? not to mention families, their debt loads, other businesses that rely on their money earned being spent with them?

i've said it before and i'll say it again - this is what happens when accountability is shifted from the stakeholder to the shareholder.

here's an idea. turn businesses into co-operatives with a cap on the number of people involved. have the co-operatives organise into unions or whatever but keep the business decisions made by people actually involved in the businesses on a coal-face level.

how about this? make it the responsibility of corporations to find work for those workers who are being "let go" before they're fired, or made redundant, or whatever lame-ass phrase the business community is using to deflect from the fact that a person who has a job today won't have it tomorrow. say, "sure, move those 1800 positions from here in australia to overseas, that's fine, but find all those out-of-work people jobs first".

maybe this kind of labour externalisation could be called treason. it might be acting in the shareholders' best interests but it's hardly acting in australia's best interests...

... immoral?

in an offhand comment a couple of weeks ago in discussion with a work colleague about aspects of different faiths, i mentioned that one of the things i like about Christianity is that, in a sense, we not only get our cake but we can eat it too - and before we've had dinner! we are offered heaven on a stick and need do nothing before saying yes in order to receive it. (kind of true and kind of not, i know.) she remarked that she felt it was immoral.

it's a remark that's been bugging me a bit over the last few weeks while i've been trying to finish a zine about how i came to be a Christian. it's an aspect that i want to address in my zine, since it does form a part of my understanding of my salvation experience (if i can use the phrase), but every time i try to pin down what i think about it my word count blows out. i'm thinking maybe this would make a good issue #2...

that being said, i thought i'd voice a couple of things here and see if people had any thoughts.

i guess the thing that bothered me most is, in the absence of God, from where does a person's moral compass gain its direction? or, if the person does believe in God, or a god, then what do they believe God to be like and how does this, if at all, inform their own moral compass?

it seems to me that, absent God, there is no real need for a moral compass. one simply acts according to one's desires, weighing outcomes against risks and rewards, and considering the gains or shortfalls of long- or short-term investments in pastimes and relationships. if a person feels there is no God and they do not believe they will be caught and punished by authorities, then it truly is up to the whim of that person what they will do with their day - they might be a murderer or a meals-on-wheels driver for invalid shut-ins. they choose their own moral north.

social mores and norms vary with the group, obviously, but even if one does not consciously choose to adopt the moral north of their "developmental context" (shall we say), not consciously choosing an alternative may well yield the same result, albeit with less conviction of belief. however, in the absence of an unchanging moral north, immoral is merely a question of perspective. (see star wars - return of the jedi for more discussion on truth and disparate points of view.)

my faith in Christ is rooted in the Cross and in Jesus' resurrection from the dead. i take these as matters of historical fact, aside from their salvation-meaning for me and in the sweep of Bible history as a whole. that Jesus lived and was killed is corroborated by sources external to the Bible canon, with no vested interest in such corroboration and with far less reliable history/provenance of transmission from antiquity to now.

the Bible tells me that Jesus' death is a sacrifice that turns aside the burning anger of God towards me and directs it upon his innocent Son (mercy, where i do not get what i deserve) and that since i am now counted, according to what may be considered the legal salvation framework within which God deals with human beings, as entirely and completely innocent of any and all wrongdoing, i am accorded adoption as one of God's own children and entry into heaven and eternal life with God (grace, where i get what i do not deserve).

so, heaven is my cake and i can effectively eat of it immediately. there is, of course, a but.

if i claim to be a hawthorn football club fan but dress in essendon bombers red and black, go to training at windy hill and can sing every word to "see the bombers fly up!", people would be forgiven if they thought that i were simply saying one thing and doing another. likewise, if i become a Christian but make no change in the way i live my life, who can say if i'm a Christian at all?

i think that this is what was being thought of as immoral, this salvation-before-works mechanism, that is so alien to pretty much every other religion i've heard of. many seem to be variations on a theme: do this, do that, make enough converts, kill enough chickens, kill enough infidels, do enough good deeds and maybe you'll get into heaven.

maybe. there's no assurance that i can see. the idea popularised in movies like the siege, that islamist extremists believe there to be seventy virgins waiting for them in paradise after a successful suicide bombing attack, is something i don't know the truth of. i've not had any serious discussion about this kind of thing with any muslims. it is about as close to the tangible assurance that Christians are offered as i've seen or heard of anywhere else. the idea that annihilation is the best chance of escaping an endless cycle of reincarnation jells with me, since an eternity in hell and an eternity of reincarnating on earth might (tongue in cheek) not look terribly different.

so how much is enough? how good is good enough? and what yardstick is there to measure by? "i've never killed someone" holds little water if you've never actually wanted to and yet restrained yourself, but is the person who genuinely wants to kill somebody the kind of person you want to meet in heaven? this moral north is pretty wobbly, especially with a good so relative!

Christianity is a funny thing. it offers salvation at no cost to the consumer with a three and a half thousand year old manual on care and feeding of that salvation. God didn't say to the israelites in egypt, sacrifice ten thousand bulls and i'll get you out of there. nope. he said to pharaoh (the guy in power who'd enslaved the israelites), let my people go. once they were let go, then he told them what to do. he took them camping, fed them, their shoes never wore out! once they got to the promised land, conquering it was pretty easy - when they did it the way God said to do it. follow the manual because you have salvation, not in order to have it.

God loves human beings and God loves his creation. the Bible makes pretty clear throughout what it considers to be moral. basically, love God, love others. in many ways, to love is to serve, thus: serve God and serve others. loving someone doesn't necessarily mean agreeing with them, or letting them run riot, or letting them hurt themselves or ruin their life or the lives of people around them. restraining a child from running across a busy street might be a slam-dunk moral choice to protect the child - so why do we not automatically put convicted heroin addicts into that fast detox programme they have in israel, or bring that programme here? if market forces combine (if not conspire) to make medical care or pharmaceutical treatments expensive beyond the reach of people requiring those treatments, why should those forces be allowed to persist?

why should people starve or be homeless when there is anecdotal evidence aplenty, if not statistical proof, that the west produces more food than it can eat, and has unemployed people who could be employed building housing for those who have none?

when enough is as good as a feast, a few in this world stand on their right to keep the leftovers to themselves and despise their responsibility to feed those who have not eaten. this is what comes of having a moral compass that points due relative north.

i'm not perfect. i believe that i am being made perfect. the Bible says it and I believe it. what do you believe?

... travelling man

well, i'm moving house - again.

before i moved out of home, i think we'd moved twice, the third house we lived in being the one my mother still lives in. i shared a flat in north wollongong for a while before making the big move to sydney, where i lived in:

• penshurst,
• penshurst,
• carlton,
• mortdale,
• hurstville,
• kogarah,
• chatswood,
• then chatswood again.

since leaving sydney, i've lived in:

• carnegie,
• elsternwick,
• and soon to be glen iris.

that's a fair bit of moving around, since i moved to sydney in may of 1994.

i never expect the next place to be the last, so i wonder how long it'll be before the next move? hopefully not until some other similarly life-changing thing...

... ahhh! the southerly change!

hot damn! bring on the rain, bring on a decent storm! (or is that too much to ask for?) bring on the cooler temperatures!

roll on winter!

... postgrad wedding blues

i'm not married, i'm not a postgrad (on account of never having grad'd) and at the moment i'm not blue, but i saw this comic strip on phd comics and felt it was a ripsnorter.

two jobs ago, while i was still living in el norte, we used to have a lot of people coming into the shop looking for paper products for creating their own wedding stationery. it's the kind of combination logistical-creative problem i love, since you can work out what you're going to do by considering such variables as:

1. how much money you want to spend,
2. how much time you have available,
3. how much time you want to spend,
4. how creative you'd like to be,
5. how creative you know you actually are,
6. how many flunkies you have available to you in the time you have available, and
7. how many friends and relations would disown you if you actually did elope after all...

i think it's an interesting challenge.

having been involved to varying degrees with a number of weddings now, i have considered from time to time a variety of wedding-related career paths, including:

• professional m.c. (for about five seconds),
• wedding planner,
• wedding stationery consultant, and
• celebrant...

crazily enough, the last one has had the most lasting appeal and i've actually looked into courses and whatnot regarding this.

all of which is thinking-out-loud, random, by-the-by thoughts, sparked by the funny comic strip.

... bitter and cynical?

hmmm...

wow! how amazing. scorching temperatures and the public transport system collapses. quelle tragédie!

why is this a surprise? just as i'm not surprised we have tennis players passing out or retiring hurt at the australian open, i'm not surprised we had the "transport chaos" we experienced today. i'm expecting bushfires and do you know why? because people do stupid things all the time (i know i do) and it doesn't matter how many fire warnings you put up or how many bushfires you fight, there will always be people who want to set fires. so many people operate under the assumption that whatever the statistics or conventional wisdom (neither of which are always right, either), "it won't happen to them".

the australian open operates during summer under insanely variable conditions, usually varying for the worse regarding the players' health. wimbledon always seems to be stopping and starting for rain - certainly the cricket seems to stop and start with the rain. one of the risks you run playing in the australian open is that you may collapse from heat exhaustion.

if you rely on public transport during a heatwave, expect problems. take some water bottles and a book. charge your ipod. do dinner and a movie after work. carpool. do not expect to catch your usual train/tram/bus and have everything working perfectly. think.

i saw a story on a current affair (i think it was) tonight, reporting on drivers who will not wait for rail crossing signals and instead drive around boom gates to cross ahead of trains. how insane is that? this is the world we are living in, where people have such an infinitely high sense of entitlement that even in the face of six train cars full of passengers and travelling at up to a barely brakable hundred kilometres per hour they persist in believing that whatever might happen to someone else stupid enough to try this, it won't happen to them.

perhaps it's too much to expect that people who will try to beat rail crossing signals that have already dropped boom gates might seek to elect governments that will provide infrastructure for the future of people other than themselves...

... i'm reviewing... the situation...

i'm thinking about moving house. i looked at a bunch of for lease ads last night and actually sent out a few tentative inquiries. i don't know if i'll do anything straight away but i feel i'd like to live closer to church and closer to work. it's something i'm toying with at the moment, so if you feel so inclined, please pray that i will make a full, prayerful, considered, thoughtful approach to this... rumination.

... happy new year

it was asked of me that i update my blog. here, then, is the news...

it's a new year. i don't know what you did on new year's eve. i was invited to a boozeup in northcote. since i'm such a boozer, i gave a reluctant "maybe", thanking that it's probably not a terrible thing to get out and meet people and maybe even enjoy myself. however, after buying a bottle of bailey's, having a shower and a shave, getting dressed and heading out with a locked door behind me, i decided that i didn't really want to go.

hard to say, really, what the kicker was. could it be my utter lack of desire to get plastered? my poor inclination in meeting new people and making friends of strangers? my general preference not to surround myself with uncreasingly drunk strangers in any given situation, especially at new year's? or my eminently reasonable desire not to navigate melbourne's otherwise stellar public transport system in the wee hours of new year's day from northcote to south caulfield? hmmm...

so for new year's i ended up at home, listening to music and reading, with a cup of coffee (and some bailey's), and sent a few text messages when the hallowed hour rolled around. happy new year to everyone.

Christmas passed quietly also. my mother visited from el norte and i enjoyed dinner with my mother and sister, and my sister's boyfriend. it's taken me a long time to meet him and i like him. that my sister is happy to hitch her wagon to his speaks a lot more to me for his character than my first impressions, which were good. he seems to me to be very down to earth, which i think is a good thing.

Christmas day i was at church. i had been invited to join my minister's family for lunch, which i gratefully accepted and thoroughly enjoyed. there had been an orphans' lunch planned for some of us neighbours here in my block of flats, which i had factored in but which everyone, it seems, did not. the invitation was providential and i am very glad of it.

my minister now has been my minister before. i think he was at the church i went to when i was at school - certainly he was there when i left - and i'm confident he was there before my conversion but to be honest, i can't recall. i remember being given a copy of leon morris's book the atonement, which i was meant to read a chapter of and then meet for breakfast with my minister and another man at church. it was a great thing to do and i'm glad the effort was made by these two men, whom i so poorly repaid with my efforts at reading the book. i learned important lessons about meeting regularly with people outside church, about deliberate fellowship (and accountability, a lesson that i never seem to stop being taught), lessons which served me in good stead for the years i was part of a prayer triplet at another church. it's something i miss.

work is good. i realised that this Christmas just passed was my 20th retail "xmas". i began working at venture ("venture - value - value with a double-v!") in october 1989, making december 2008 my 20th working in retail. frightening. also, my first rostered sunday in about eight years. i am getting to know better my workplace, my role, my co-workers, the customers and the area we service. all places (workplaces or workplace locales) have their quirks. i'm told i'm doing very well but i continue the pessimist, convinced that i'll make a mistake and the rug will be pulled out from under me and i'll be revealed for the fraud that i fear i am... so nothing really new there, i suppose.

i am looking forward to visiting el norte in february for a while, seeing some friends and taking in a trade fair while i'm there. with any luck i'll get a decent thunderstorm or two, which i sorely miss down here, south of the border. i would like to visit the united states in august to attend the portland zine symposium and i am hoping to sock away enough cash to make that happen with a minimum of fuss. we'll see.

i finally saw grindhouse at the astor on friday night - i can't believe it took me so long to see it! it was great. i'm just over halfway through the peter biskind book, easy riders, raging bulls, about hollywood in the 70s that i have borrowed from a coworker. i'm thoroughly enjoying it and every chapter brings with it flashbacks to my cinema studies at uni and the marvellous lecturers i had then.

i was invited along to a cafe after church on sunday night and had a grand old time. the cafe had to serve us on split tables because we didn't all fit in at once but that was ok. i ate a thoroughly delicious lemon tart and enjoyed very pleasant company throughout, something definitely to be repeated on both counts.

coming up next, what are the obama kids having for lunch today? (ask jon stewart on the daily show) then sports...

... reading...

wow, i've been reading a lot lately.

• eragon, christopher paolini
  
• twilight, stephenie meyer
  
• breakfast at tiffanys, truman capote
  
• the jane austen book club, karen joy fowler
  
• the gargoyle, andrew davidson
  
• notes from undergound: zines and the politics of alternative culture, stephen duncombe
  

...and they're just the ones i've finished!

i'm also working on (albeit infrequently or haphazardly):

• how to eat, nigella lawson
  
• war and peace, leo tolstoy
  
• type, david silverman
  
• easy riders, raging bulls, peter biskind
  
• intimate ephemera, anna poletti
  

... and, of course, the Bible!

all this in the space of the last three and a bit months, since i began my new job. imagine if i were working in a video store!

... do we really think they'll be left out anyway?

bloody telstra!

how long did they have a monopoly (virtual or otherwise) in australia? under whatever name?

so if all there is to the report is what appears on the face of it, why should they whinge and moan about being left out of the tender process for our national broadband network?

this is classic. what is the thinking? "wow, we live on this huge island and we're so far away from each other! why don't we just try and make more people talk to each other on those really long pieces of string with tin cans attached instead of making new strings with better tin cans?"

it is yet another example of what happens when responsibility to the stakeholder is superseded by obligation to the shareholder. the consumer is consulted only in order to find some new product or service to sell back to them!

with better communication lines, broadband, satellite services, whatever, the need to clump people together like a tonne of marbles on one corner of a giant trampoline is reduced further. large-scale administration can be decentralised and opportunities for growth can be passed to rural and provincial cities, such as grafton, dubbo, cobar, broken hill, griffith, shepparton, warnambool, mildura, ballarat, bairnsdale, mount gambier, mount isa, cairns, longreach, cunnamulla, port hedland, geraldton, albany, kalgoorlie. why not encourage the growth of as many of these rural cities as possible, instead of contributing to the ridiculous urban sprawl that is such a blight on our country?

wow... perhaps with better communication and people moving out of the capital and satellite cities, there might be a greater demand for better rail and air connections? (oh don't be an idiot! people will simply bitch about having to sdrive their cars so far! what were thinking?!)

i don't know. telstra sucks. we could have had a far better network if we'd invested more in it decades ago. of course, that would have required a bit of foresight and that was so abundant in the 1980s...

... not quite in the club yet

i watched the jane austen book club today, just now (about half an hour ago, in fact), and i really enjoyed it. i think i'm tempted to actually read through the jane austen canon. pretty scary, given my terrible experience of jane austen at high school.

we had to study persuasion and i really didn't enjoy it at all. i enjoyed less that austen had lengthened the book from 29 chapters to 44! that said, i always felt guilty that i hadn't given the book a better chance, especially since our teacher was such a huge jane austen fanatic - i always worried that my dislike for the book was received more as a personal insult and less as coming from a sci-fi nut having to read period romance and social commentary.

so i'm going to get the novel of the jane austen book club, read that, and then perhaps read the novels afterwards.

... i am wrong

...apparently.

i was told today that i cannot be discriminated against.

not that there is a law that says discriminating against me personally is illegal but rather that, by virtue of my skin colour, sexual preference, religious preference, socio-economic background, personal tastes, age, country of birth and place of residence, it is a political-logical impossibility that i should be discriminated against.

... things to do when you're home sick

well, when you're home sick, feeling nauseous and dealing with diarrhoea, sometimes you end up casting about for things to do to pass the time. here's a list:

1. sleep;
   
2. read a book;
   
3. watch a movie;
   
4. follow the united states presidential election on various tv channels;
   
5. play dune 2000;
   
6. make a zine;
   
7. do some washing (if you feel confident you can get to the laundry without needing the loo!);
   
8. update your weblog;
   
9. clean the bathroom;
   
10. trawl wikipedia and other websites, trying to understand how the u.s. electoral processes work.

of course, i could call refund home loans and try to find out how on earth buying into a home loan provider franchise could possibly be a good thing for anyone but me (maybe). o me! o life!

... and among other things, i took a test!

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test...

Traditional, Vibrant, and Tasteful

1 Islamic, -2 Impressionist, 1 Ukiyo-e, -2 Cubist, -4 Abstract and -12 Renaissance!

Islamic art is developed from many sources: Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine styles were taken over in early Islamic architecture; the architecture and decorative art of pre-Islamic Persia was of paramount significance; Central Asian styles were brought in with various nomadic incursions; and  Chinese influences .  Islamic art uses many geometical floral or vegetable designs in a repetitive pattern known as arabesque.  It is used to symbolize the transcendent, indivisible and infinite nature of Allah.

People that like Islamic art tend to be more traditional people that appreciate keeping patterns that they learned and experienced from their past.  It is not to say that they are not innovative personalities, they just do not like to let go of their roots.  They like to put new ideas into details and make certain that they will work before sharing them with others.  Failure is not something they like to think about because they are more interested in being successful and appreciated for their intelligence.  These people can also be or like elaborate things in their life as long as they are tasteful.  They tend to prefer geometric patterns and vibrant colors.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy

... what have i been up to?

• i've been reading war and peace... but not as regularly as i'm supposed to be (i've fallen a little bit behind, partly because...)
  
• i've been reading the penguin history of the u.s.a. and i've been learning a great deal about the revolutionary war, the declaration of independence and the years and conditions leading up to the civil war. i'd heard of andrew jackson but knew little of him. i'd never even heard of alexander hamilton until about a month ago, when i read a book by gore vidal about some of the figures surrounding the early years of the u.s. constitution and became interested in learning more.
  
• i've been looking for a new job. i have had a couple of promising leads and may have more to say about it in the near future!
  
• i'm off to church camp next weekend. my new church is friendly and interesting and i'm still working out how i'd like to be involved in church life. i was so long out of a regular church context it feels kind of weird and a little artificial trying to acclimatise myself to a new church environment.
  
• i've got several ideas for stories and screenplays that i'd like to get stuck into and i'm exploring some new software i've downloaded to help me do that called celtx - it really is chock-full of writing goodness.
  
• i bought some language learning software and i'm teaching myself spanish. i learned the days of the week a couple of days ago... lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, sábado, domingo!
  
• it's raining in melbourne (quelle surprise, i hear some people mutter) and i'm really enjoying the melbourne-ness of it. winter actually is winter here and while it's my second winter in melbourne it is still a heartwarming thing for me. i adore the cold weather and melbourne has been most generous in warming my heart!
  
• a few weeks ago some of the buildings in melbourne that you don't normally have the chance to see up close and personal threw their doors open for guided tours. i wandered around the city a bit with a friend from the library and ended up seeing less than i expected to see (some of the queues were extraordinarily long!) but it was very cool looking at the capitol theatre (i think it was) that had been designed by walter burley griffin, the same man largely responsible for canberra! such an obsession with geometry...

... and that's about it for the time being...

... time for a change

i've resigned from my job.

talking with people about it has yielded a few interesting remarks but the general feel is that i shouldn't be quitting my job without having one ready to go into. i agree that such a course of action is a wise one but it isn't one i feel works with my current situation.

for starters, when it comes to work i don't generally flitter from pillar to post. in the last eighteen years i've had three main jobs, with a couple of other jobs here and there. i also feel (whether that comes across in my work life or not) a genuine commitment to my workplace, to make it a better place for the long term and to be able to say that when i leave it will be better than it was when i arrived (and, no, not because of my arrival and departure!).

the time has come for me, in my current work environment, to leave. i have my reasons and i'm hoping that i'll find a new job sooner than later. contacts in the industry i work in have already been very encouraging and i will be following up on at least one of them tomorrow! if you feel so inclined, please pray that i won't be looking for very long and that the place i'm meant to be at will be quickly made apparent to me.

several people have asked if i'll move back to sydney. my answer (at this point) is no. my reasons for leaving sydney have not changed and nor have my reasons for moving to melbourne. i love this city. the weather suits me down to the ground, it's easy to get around and people here are so friendly. i love my involvement with sticky (at sidebar, right) and the great friends i've made through it. i'm gradually getting to know people at my new church and i'm looking forward to church camp and joining a small group Bible study very soon. i started my current job because i was moving to melbourne - i didn't move to melbourne because i had found my current job.

i have a cold. my video recorder is kaktus. a friend from school got married last weekend (yay!). God loves me. my life is pretty good.

... the end of an era?

imagine my surprise to find when, in a fit of public-spiritedness and interest in current affairs, i decided to turn on channel 9 on the tv while i was eating breakfast this morning, only to find that it's the last broadcast of the sunday programme.

sunday has been screening since i was six years old, its first broadcast in 1981 featuring laurie oakes interviewing then-prime minister malcolm fraser. today, in the last broadcast, laurie oakes is interviewing kevin rudd.

it came as a complete surprise to me that sunday is winding up. all tv programmes come to an end sooner or later - i imagine even 60 minutes will end one day - but i had no idea, had seen or heard nothing about its end in other media outlets - until this morning as ellen fanning reiterated for newly-switched-over viewers that today's is the last broadcast for sunday.

what will come next week? what programmes on australian television will now pick up the baton for investigative, "who knows what we will find?" journalism? helen dalley (now on sky news) commented that the difference between sunday and 60 minutes schools of story production was that on the latter, journalists and producers had researched the stories to the point that when they went into production they would know exactly what they wanted to say and exactly what they were looking at; on the former, journos and producres might not know what they'd find - only that there was a story there worth pursuing. who will do that now? (by the way, how gorgeous is nell schofield??? i think she's even more beautiful now, 27 years after puberty blues, than she was back then...)

it's difficult to get myself excited about news and current affairs programmes on australian television. a current affair and today tonight are barely worth the name of "current affairs" and much more like... the magazines they sell on the shelves nearest the checkouts at supermarkets! for mine, shows like dateline, landline, and the 7.30 report are genuine current affairs programmes.

perhaps it's even scarier that the 6 o'clock news programmes are advertising stories they're going to run (so-called "special reports") when i would've thought there's plenty to report in the news on an ordinary day without using stocking stuffers that they could put into their 6.30 current affairs (sic) programmes...

peter thompson commented that the australian film industry at the moment is in "deep schtuck". i don't think it's just the film industry. when decisions to cancel programmes like sunday come down from the people who are supposed to be far-sighted about such things, i fear the continued dumbing-down of australian television. calling it "making tv relevant" is a cop-out. in a world that wants to talk (it seems) in a language of icons, top 40 soundtracks and emotion, television seems to be leading the way to letting people slip back into a common baby-talk, instead of encouraging critical thinking and thoughtful consideration of the world around us.

our forebears' fears that television would make people stupid seems to be coming true.

... what the...?

perhaps this should've been an offer for a memory upgrade?

... from watership down

my heart has joined the Thousand,
for my friend stopped running today...

... new comic

i know it's been a long time since i posted but i want to assure everyone that, regardless of how i've been feeling from time to time, i'm not doing an enobarbus anywhere! i've been flat-chat busy with work and exhausted pretty much all of the time, neither of which i'm happy about but feel that won't be the case for much longer.

church-wise, i've been going to st mark's anglican church at camberwell, where the minister is actually one i've known in a past life in my early days of faith (from dapto). it's good but i've been slack in following up queries about small groups and i've been patchy in attendance. that being said, it's probably the most comfortable place i've been so far since i moved to melbourne. the fact that it's about 35-40 minute trip from my place to there (if i leave early) is about the worst thing i can think to say about it. apparently there's a lot of pigeons but going to the evening service, i haven't seen any.

to round out this entry, though, i linked to a comic strip called unshelved from my regular reading at phd comics. quite entertaining.

... iron man

i have to say i was very impressed with this film. it lived up to my expectations from the previews and tv spots, the effects were great and seemed to me to be rooted in an kind of organic reality which is much sought after in special effects movies these days (see transformers).

right from the outset i said that on character alone, robert downey jr was born for this role. take a character who is an egotist, alcoholic, wealthy, brilliant, philandering, ne'er-do-well only child prodigy of workaholic parents... who else do you get to play tony stark?!

i thought gwyneth paltrow as pepper potts was great, although her "action" sequences in the third act of the film weren't (for me) set up very well. had she had one or two more active sequences earlier in the film i might have believed in her a bit more. as it is, she felt a bit more to me like "pepper puppet" at the end of the strings in tony stark's hands. i don't doubt that the character is capable but i pepper as presented in this film was not.

jeff bridges and terrence howard were good, bridges much better than howard in the skin of his character (i had trouble believing rhodey being such a close friend of tony stark's but none at all buying obadiah stane as the family friend turned nemesis).

i watched the film to the very end of the credits and my final thoughts on the film were these: i love the movie but i feel a bit dirty - tony stark's final revelation was poor... and that is NOT nick fury.

... i love nigella...'s cooking!

upon being told of a cookbook worth investigating, i went into my local angus & robertson bookshop to investigate. they didn't have the title i was looking for but they did have the new nigella lawson cookbook, nigella express.

i flicked through it a little and about five recipes in i found this one for mustard pork chops.



hopefully it'll taste as good when i make it as it looks like it does when nigella makes it!

... i love my back

it's been a while since i blogged. it's part procrastination, part i-have-no-internet-at-home(-and-seem-unlikely-to-in-the-near-future), part my life feels very blah at the moment... but i love my back.

this weekend just gone i was away from melbourne, in sydney for a trade show. the fair was ok and i was pretty tired from having to be out of bed at 4.30am to get my 7.45 flight from tullamarine. there was a harbour cruise dinner in the evening that i was ready to leave about two hours prior to docking, simply due to fatigue.

the biggest problem was that i had another back spasm on sunday morning while getting dressed. i've been waking up as "pretzel man" every day since and while i'm recovering faster and feeling less sore as the days wear on, it's still frustrating. i wasn't able to be as quick on my feet and people i wanted to visit i wasn't able to - very, very frustrating.

back in melbourne, i had yesterday off so i could at least have one day of lying down, which was what i did. then around 3pm we had a blackout as part of the big windstorm that came out of the low pressure cell from the south. power wasn't restored to my part of town until about 5am today. blah.

all things considered, this is about as interesting as it's been. as for the title of my post?

as i was crossing the road near the slip inn on my way back from breakfast at cockle bay wharf, i noticed some people crossing against the light. i turned to watch them go and noticed a woman standing very close, closer than people would normally stand if you're the only two people at the lights. she seemed equally surprised. "i suppose i should introduce myself!" she laughed. i commented that this was the kind of conversation i enjoy in melbourne (randomly with strangers) and she mentioned that she might have already crossed. i remarked that i was a bit slower than normal due to my back spasm and she replied that she was a healer (i assume a reiki therapist or some such) and she offered to give me a go.

five minutes later i'm standing besides the slip inn, bag on the ground and eyes closed while she did... whatever... to my back. afterwards, she said, "i'm feeling a lot of dark energy there... what i really need you to do is to love your back. do you love your back?"

i really love my back!

... still alive

i'm sitting here at sticky, marvelling at how tidy the desktop on the computer screen is, trying to think about what's been going on in the last few weeks.

it's been pretty busy. after almost a dozen weeks of looking, i'm now in my new place. it's pretty small, but i guess that makes it "neat and cosy" or some equally real-estately euphemism for "small enough to swing a young cat, maybe". i quite like it. it reminds me a lot of my old place in kogarah (something i think i mentioned before) but after some discussion with mum on the phone a few nights ago i realised it also reminds me of my grandparents' last place in unanderra. the direction of entry into the flat is different from theirs, and i have no backyard, no outside toilet/laundry... similar then, but not the same.

the neighbours that i've met so far have been very welcoming and friendly. a couple of them have taken to semi-regularly going on walks of an evening in an effort to boost fitness levels, something to which i've been given an open invitation i've yet to take up. and so on...

i'm currently without a fridge, something i'm hoping to remedy this weekend but how successfully remains to be seen. i moved out of my family's home in may 1994 and this is the first time in all that time that i've been drinking powdered milk! (it's actually not as bad as i might have anticipated...) i have some uht milk in popper-portions but i don't like to open them unless i'm going to drink the whole portion in a sitting. good for breakfast cereal, not so great for a cup of tea at the end of the day...

i have rent due in about a fortnight and i'm trying very hard not to send any more money than i need to on things, not because i want to have money to pay the rent (obviously i want that!) but because i'm still saving towards going to the u.s. in august for the portland zine symposium. i have a stash saved towards it but moving house meant that i had to dip rather heavily into it. I'm not too concerned - my tax refund and the return of my bond over the coming months will greatly assist my savings in this regard again - but i am a touch worried. anyone who knows me will tell you that i'm not very good at saving and i secretly suspect in my heart of hearts that portland may end up getting carried over to next year. i really don't want it to, though, and if i can get there this year, i will.

that's about it for the time being. i've been having a lot of trouble trying to get internet connection at home and i think at the end of the day i may have to go with some kind of wireless broadband option. until then i'll be relying on free wi-fi at cafes and public spaces, along with my lunch times at work...

oh well... i get the feeling that God saved this new place for me as an opportunity to prune my life of extraneous crap. i guess news will follow as it comes to hand!

... not long now

i pick up the keys this afternoon. i'm still quite excited, even though i know the actual moving part is going to be a touch difficult, given the way the balcony is laid out and how far along from the stairs my flat is. i'll pick the keys up, come back into town to go to the zine event for the festival of the photocopier (follow the links from sticky), then go back there and measure the place up for the fridge.

i'm hoping to move some stuff in over the weekend, bibs and bobs that i can get there on my own steam, and i have removalists taking the bulk of my stuff later. my housemate is moving out mid-week, so i'll be without a fridge for a bit but that's no biggie - i'll get some uht milk in the small-format six-pack and use that on my cereal.

anyway, i have to get back to work. i'm here early to make up for leaving early this afternoon.

... new digs

well, i have new digs. i signed the lease today and i pick up the keys on friday. it's pretty exciting, actually, and i think it's the first place i've actually the signed the lease on for about five or six years. a while. it's a nice place, reminds me a lot of my place in kogarah, although this is only a one-bedroom and not a two-bedroom place.

there's a bus stop just outside and across the road from the block of units i'm going to be in, which is a mixed blessing: one route takes me up to the next station but far less frequently than the other route goes into the city. the flip side to this is the nearest station has trains which only take about 15 minutes into the city, while the bus directly to the city takes almost an hour. bus-train beats out bus-only in peak hour (i tested it this morning). i'll be interested to see how the weekend traffic affects the times.

it's taken quite a bit of time to find. i've been looking more or less for two months now, since my housemate decided to move east, nearer to church. i've looked at one- and two-bedroom places at ofis (open for inspections), which seem to be the main method of property managers scooping up applicants, and about a dozen various share places. i didn't remember this being this hard, back in 2001. when i found my place in kogarah, i think the whole process only took a few days... although, once i saw the place, that's about how long it took for this new place.

i had seen the unit advertised as being ofi about three or four weeks ago but through prior arrangements and mischance i didn't actually get to see it. so last saturday i had planned to look at three places - one in richmond, two in st kilda east - but i felt too tired to hit the richmond one up and decided to go to elsternwick instead and see if i could snag the keys to see a unit on glenhuntly rd in elwood, just on the other side of the nepean highway.

well, after having a long and involved conversation with the receptionist about her injured finger ("it was just a little cut but two weeks later i woke up at 1 a.m. and all there was in the universe was the pain at the end of my finger and "nursesonline" said, 'you have four hours to get to the emergency room' and now it's bandaged out to buggery..."), i discovered that the unit would be unavailable to view for another week while they did some painting and carpeting work. with some time to kill, i ducked across the road to another real estate agent, where i discovered to my astonishment that the unit i'd missed the ofi at was still available to view! i paid my fifty bucks and hopped a cab to go check it out.

first floor. wooden floor boards throughout. wooden slat venetians in the east-facing lounge room. pokey little kitchen (my words - in real estate speak it would be classified as "neat"). two sets of four powerpoints in the lounge room and two pairs in the bedroom. built-in wardrobe in the bedroom. gas hot water. good hot water pressure! communal laundry downstairs with big-arse laundromat washer and dryer for a dollar a load. car space (oh, the irony). great neighbours.

so great, in fact, that when i was leaving the block i ended up having a bit of a yak with them and they (hilda ("i moved in in 1982") and sharon ("i think about getting fit while i'm lying down with a block of fruit & nut") were on their way out for the day) gave me a lift back into elsternwick! how great is that?! so i applied for the place, ditched my plans for the rest of the looking-at-units, and wandered into town.

they phoned monday to say they were offering it to me. hadn't spoken to any of my three referees... i guess my application spoke for itself in ways that the last dozen applicants' hadn't. so i signed the lease today (tuesday, even though i know it's now wednesday) and i pick up the keys friday. so i'll be out of lovely carnegie by the end of the month.

i'm rather looking forward to the whole thing.

my housemate's blog included this little tidbit, upon settling on the new digs further east:
and where was God in all this? as it turns out... here the whole time... there were plenty of whiny prayers from me, i admit, but i've slowly come to pray more and more "i shall trust you whatever the outcome, and trust that all of this will make me more like Jesus."

as for myself, i didn't pray very much about my own search. i was fully confident that i would find a place, somewhere God was happy for me to be or (perhaps slightly more accurately) where he wants me to be from now on (for whatever reason that may be). i've been feeling pretty distant from God lately, not because of the search for somewhere to live but because i haven't been giving our relationship the attention it needs. i continue much encouraged by the passage:

Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound! Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. The saying is trustworthy, for:

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he also will deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—

for he cannot deny himself.
[ 2 Timothy 2:8-13, ESV ]

in those times when i find myself drifting, more or less actively, away from God, knowing that he is unchanging in his love and faithfulness is the most tremendous comfort to me. that is what keeps bringing me back to him. when i fall down, it's always shame and selfishness that keep me from getting up again but it's the unchanging word of God and the power of the cross that break through that.

... happy accident

i found this while i was trying to get an earworm out of my head. i went looking for a piece of music from the u.k. talent show "the x-factor" (and "kill bill") called "battle without honor or humanity". i looked on youtube for a film clip that accompanied it, found an interesting one cobbled together from bits of the star wars movies...

and then found this:

... qfs

i'm very sad to say how utterly unsurprised i was to hear/read about the out of control party at narre warren over the weekend. i can't help but hear the voice of v in the background as i think about it...

how did this happen? who's to blame? well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

how do parents instill in their children a sense of responsibility toward others when everything in the world around them tells them only to think of themselves?

i've heard people say that there comes a time when you have to think of yourself, which leaves me to wonder if it ever really need be true... after all, if you can have two people looking out for one another, making sure they're safe, why can we not have 22 million people in this country looking out for one another? why can we not actively seek to make sure as we step into the future that the person beside us is not left behind?

we talk about being "the lucky country" as if we are somehow different from other nations but the more i see our newscasts and read our papers, the more i see advertising and billboards, the more i hear people on trains and see them on streets, the less difference i see between australia and the rest of the western world. this is the effluent affluence that developing nations are aspiring towards? so they too can afford to crave the things we have? type-2 diabetes, spiralling divorce rates, people unable to build things or repair things but wonderfully trained to create web pages complaining about why the water pressure is poor or why new houses are so expensive...?

our very success is the albatross around our neck: our prosperity makes us targets which need to be defended by men and women with guns; our growing population weighs our economy down with credit card debt being paid to overseas interests while we import food because we cannot support our own appetites; there is no apology without the expectation of damages; there is no forgiveness...

when i started writing this i wanted to come up with a rant about irresponsible young people who could probably do with a good thumping when it comes to being punished for damaging people's homes and our community's police cars. i want to see the people i perceive as being the cause of this be punished.

what i want is wrong. what i should want is not recompense but redemption, not judgement but justification - not payment for past mistakes but a changed direction to a better future.

i read that some party organiser said that this young man's party organising skills would be worth $10,000. so heart warming that such public if deniably tacit approval of defying one's parents can be so rewarding; such a pity that that only comes halfway to paying the bill for cleaning up such a wonderfully well-organised party last weekend! one person thinks he's hot; another described him as having raided doctor zhivago's wardrobe.

it comes as no surprise to me that the community outrage that some might have expected to see about this incident hasn't much teeth. for the appropriate level of community outrage i suspect there needs to be a certain level of community responsibility felt within the community itself by its members towards each other, community responsibility that would have meant this would never have happened in the first place. five hundred people would have been fifty, who would have accepted that the police were there because the community as a whole empowered them to say, "you have gone thus far - too far".

so we have an acceptable level of debt, when any debt was something to be worked off rather than lived on; acceptable levels of unemployment, homelessness, divorce, scandal, corruption... what a lucky country we are! what? are we a lucky country? compared to others, perhaps. compared with what we could be, no.

we are some of us living on the verandah of a mansion, scorning the people on the stairs, ignoring those at the bottom of the driveway, and all of us together refusing to turn around and bring everyone inside the house.

... i love blogs like this

i came across this blog as i was logging in to upload my last entry. very cool.

... bicycle! bicycle!!! (1)

i want to ride my bicycle!

i did, yesterday, and so i took myself off to chadstone, shopping centre of the one-bike-rack kind. i ended up locking my bike to a light post outside, being warned off so-called "dumb" signs, those posts that are simply slotted into holes in the ground without being cemented in at all.

chadstone is busy! in a very terry-pratchett-it's-all-quantum kind of way, it exerts a strong socio-economic gravitic force on the area around it... distorting traffic movement, parking areas, public transport, property and rental prices, green grocery prices - the works. scary to see that kind of thing up close. i expect any large shopping centre would have that kind of impact but chadstone seems to be a bit more pervasive than most i've seen.

i did some exploring on my way home and by the time i'd put my bike away my thighs were screaming that they were about to cramp up at any moment! i had as hot a shower as i could cope with, scrubbed hard at the sweat that had caked my body (ewww, i know, but it also kind of felt good to have exerted myself that much), and took a great deal of pleasure in washing my hair.

... well i liked it

... no resolutions

well, none but this - i want to go walking for half an hour every day.

it's been a while since i blogged but nothing terribly exciting has really happened. not that i only blog the exciting stuff... it'd be the world's shortest blog, given my preference for avoiding (chinese curse-style) interesting stuff.

new year's eve last night was the first one i've had for about 13 years where i wasn't away on a camp of some kind. what did i do? i watched fireworks on telly, caught up with some filing on my computer, and watched a film on sbs. not a whole heck of a lot. i had sausages and baked beans on toast for dinner. i'm told the temperature yesterday maxed out at about 42 degrees here in melbourne - after so many steamy summers in sydney, it totally didn't feel that hot without the humidity i was used to over the Christmas period. anyone who saw me last (or was it the year before) new year's, when sydney had all those bushfires and it was one of the hottest new year's days we'd had and it was so dry, will agree that it's definitely the humidity that knocks me about, not the heat so much...

my mum and sister were over here on Christmas Day for lunch. that could be filed under exciting, i suppose, but from my point of view it was more scary than exciting. i made a slow-cooked lamb shoulder with mint and pomegranate, peas and parmesan, zucchini slices sauteed in olive oil, chilli and garlic, and potatoes with whole spices, with a variation on eton mess, serving meringue, whipped cream, cut strawberries and pomegranate seeds and juice piled up in a big heap for dessert.

i've never slow-cooked anything before, let alone 2kg' worth of lamb, so i was very glad to wake up and find the house had not burned down overnight. in fact, the cooking had filled the house with a yummy sweet, meaty aroma.

no surprises here either - i used nigella lawson's recipes for the lamb, the potatoes and the pomegranate meringue mountain (her name, not mine; i like the succinctness of "eton mess") and jamie oliver's recipes for the peas and zucchinis... truth be told, the green dishes didn't require much in terms of recipes but when you're uncertain of how even to cook frozen peas a simple recipe goes a long way. at least i could already boil water - i know more people than i'm happy to who claim to burn even that!

... ten years later

it's hard to believe that it's already ten years yesterday since my father died. i loved him dearly, even though i don't think, even at the end, that we were terribly close.

God showed me very tangibly the enormous love he has, however, on the day of the funeral, when he brought so many of my friends together to be with me and support me that day. i thank God for each and every one whenever i think of my father.

... no

i didn't forget