... well, here we are

long-time readers will know that i have a tendency to repeat myself. it's not that i'm just as lazy with my writing as i am with my bedroom tidiness - it's that i repeatedly feel the same kind of... sense of place? sense of time? sense of experience? i feel that there are events or eras in my life that mirror or reflect others, almost to the point of repetition. so, here we are.

i was trying to explain this last week. on thursday night, i participated in a market research evening. it was one of those nights where some researchers get a bunch of people - sometimes from a variety of target markets, sometimes from one narrowly defined one - and discuss some new product or service with them, or pitch one to them, or get an idea of what they think about some product or service they are already consumers of. the one i sat in on was for wine.

obviously! you say, dear reader. you're such a wine buff! why they'd be lucky to have your opinion. well, i must confess i felt rather a fraud to begin with but really began to get into it by halfway through.

we were looking particularly at dry white wines, discussing the things we found appealing about the ones they showed us, and explaining why we felt so. one group in particular spoke to me in this way:

when i was a child, child of television that i was (am), there was a tvc that really spoke to me. it was an advert for coca-cola, in the days after the giant beach ball and the pontoon at the beach/lake (or wherever it was). it featured about eight or ten people dancing around a giant kitchen, making spaghetti bolognaise and salad for dinner, drinking coke and basically having a great time together, all to the sound of aretha franklin singing freeway of love. i think i was about nine or ten years old (circa 1984) and to me... look, i just fell in love with it.

not with coke. not with aretha franklin's freeway of love, although it's a great song and a real marker for me of the feeling this commercial aroused in me. not even with spaghetti bolognaise, although friends from my high school in year 7 may remember that the slops bowl on our table (the boys from 7c) was very definitely void of any scraps that night at teen ranch.

i fell deeply and passionately in love with the idea of friends gathered around food; having a great, fun time together preparing a meal that everyone would sit down to and keep talking about all the things they'd been talking about while they were making dinner.

it's an image that is echoed in films from the 80s too, i think. the big chill, the breakfast club, stand by me; they all resonate to me with the sense of friends as family, which i think is a kind of clichéd catch-all phrase that comes close to encapsulating that feeling. you often see advertisers trying to attain it in commercials about pasta; for some reason there's an idea that pasta=italian=large numbers of friends and family having fun for no other reason than to get together. and maybe there's something in that too.

so there you go. repetition. in expectation, in feeling, in experience, in apprehension of surroundings... in blogging!

well, here we are.

i'm in melbourne. i'm in my new place, sharing with a friend of mine from church in sydney who moved down here a few years back to pursue a stellar education in classics at university. i'm enjoying the cooler, milder weather - boy, am i! it's lovely. even the hot days are nice. compared to the muggy days in sydney i'll take 45 degrees in melbourne any day.

work is interesting. (i mean that in a chinese curse kind of way, actually.) i'm not saying that it's bad. it's not, not at all. it's just... interesting. the most interesting part about it is trying to navigate the systems at play in the business, how things are done and tracked. trying to find products in the computer can be like exploring a haystack for a needle, only to find it's called a "sewing device". the words i've been used to using for some products for the last twelve years i now need to learn new words for. i have to narrow my definition of a c.o.d. to match how that's defined within the parameters of sales (as opposed to a "cash" sale, "stats", "print", and account sales). i keep making the same mistakes over and over, asking the same questions over and over, and if i'm annoying people then i'm annoying myself even more!

in short, i'm finding the whole learning experience very frustrating. i love learning new things. learning things under pressure is not how i like to do it. still, this is the section of river i've decided to fish and dang-nabbit, uhm a-gonna fish it until uhm a-sure i dun tha best jub ah kin.

finding a new church is the next big thing on my agenda. up until now i've been attending the two churches my housemate attends. that situation would have been changing anyway, since she is consolidating her church attendance (sounds better than cutting one, doesn't it?), but where we'll be going over the next few months will be completely different.

i'll be hitching my cart to the scots' church in the city, what they call the 1730 congregation, i think. i missed the first bible study i was planning on attending with this church (i thought it was tonight but turns out it was last night!) but it was more in the way of a getting-to-know-you night... hopefully, missing it won't be disastrous. that will be my evening church group. i'll be doing my church-shopping in the mornings, the first port of call being st kilda presbyterian, starting this sunday.

this is good in a couple of ways. first, it's not badly accessible by public transport, so it seems. i'll know the truth of that on sunday, and believe me, i'll be leaving in good time to be sure i've time to get there if things go awry. second, the annual general meeting of py in victoria is there next weekend (the 17th). going to church in st kilda this weekend, then, will be something of a reconnaissance mission for the following weekend. third, my sister doesn't live far from st kilda and this might be an opportunity to catch up with her on the weekend! (what do you reckon, sis?)

i'll be coming along for about a month, see how i find it. i don't think you can really tell from one week. at the end of four weeks at st kilda i'll be in sydney for a wedding and i'd like to try and stay in sydney on sunday night, go to my latest old church, fly back down here monday morning and go straight to work. i could leave a change of clothes at work to alleviate my baggage weight too. *shrug* i guess we'll see what happens.

what else...?

i've been visiting sticky, a great shop run by volunteers committed to the support of 'zines and other small press stuff. i've bought some great stuff there recently, including a couple of dvds, one called a hundred dollars and a t-shirt and another called cantankerous titles and obscure ephemera vol.1. they're both very interesting examples of how some people in the 'zine world have approached digital video without going down the binge and purge road that youtube and the like seem to typify. both of these dvds are probably able to be sourced through amazon, but why go there? try microcosm publishing instead and deal directly with the producers! there's lots of other cool stuff available through them, and i'll be adding the link to my sidebar when i remember.

as a result of this, i'm going to be trying very hard to put out some 'zines of my own. i've got poetry 'zines i can reissue, which i've not sold through a place like sticky before, and i have one or two ideas for other things to do as well. one is kind of like a "passport to melbourne", where i'll document weekend day-trips around the place. with my new mobile phone being able to take pictures, adding images to my 'zines will be nice and easy - something i've not been able to get the hang of yet for this little gem of a blog.

anyway, i'm sure that's enough. i'll probably have to go make a cup of coffee while this uploads. ciao :)