Blue Day, Sunny Night

It was a long weekend this weekend (Australia Day on Friday - first time ever I neither voted in nor listened to the Triple J Hot 100). I went to two Sydney Festival things, both dance, one a bleak and post-apocalyptic exploration of the relationship between humans and machines, the other a Japanese-style story about a woman who is sort of a puppet, loses her mirror, gets a fan but is still upset, then gets a red fan, dies and turns into a ghost - this one had lots of beautiful imagery from nature like butterflies and water and fire, so it was easier to watch. But I sort of don't get modern dance, so beyond that I'm not sure what all I can say about them.

So, I spent lots of time with my friends that I went to the festival thing with, but when I was by myself I was feeling sort of dead and blank and like crawling in bed and just staying there, which I sort of did on Friday. Today I went into the city to run some errands, including buying new pillows, and I was so grumpy. I caught myself walking through the Coles shopping centre across the road grumpy, and thought, be happy! Smile! Be calm! Shower beneficence on everyone. Then caught myself catching myself and thought, why do I compel myself to be calm and happy? I suppose it's better for health and mental well-being and all that, but surely it's okay to be grumpy sometimes? So I spent most of the day full of hate, walking around town scowling behind my sunglasses. The thought processes were all hopeless - I'm old, I don't look right, I have no money, I'm trapped in Sydney, I never accomplish anything, there's no point in me living any more.

When I got home from shopping I thought, only one thing for it. When the thought processes go that hopeless way, the only sure cure is aerobic exercise. So I took myself off to the gym before I even had time to think about it, ran hard on the treadmill listening to the Donnas (excellent f-u music), found I was having murderous fantasies of doing harm to the Lying Liar (no, don't worry, I won't act on any of them, this doesn't count as a threat), felt much better for being angry instead of depressed, rode the exerbycle for 10 minutes and sprinted the last one, came home and got stuck right into the household tasks I've been putting off for months (I can announce that the very last box from storage has been gone through and sorted).

Now I'm up at quarter to two and have to work tomorrow, of course, which will f*ck my whole schedule for the whole week as usual, but at least I'm happy and up, not blue and up like I was all weekend.

Once again the lesson is applied - when you feel blue and hopeless, just do the right things, even if you don't feel like it, and it will change your thoughts and start things getting better.

Word serendipity

You know that thing where you see a new word, or maybe just an unusual word, and then for the next few days suddenly it appears everywhere?

"Inadvertently".

I put it in a cheeky email one day last week, not the kind of word I'd use with people who don't know me but it fit in the context I was writing. My spell-checker didn't know it, and I asked the boss who was walking by whether it was "vertent" or "vertant". (He made a joke that that's what we should call our next server.)

Then for the next few days I saw it everywhere - in other emails, in the newspaper, I think even on tv.

But I haven't discerned any higher meaning or deeper message or this word's appearance in my life. I guess I just started the chain inadvertently.

People Lie

"(I)n judging other people we need to pay attention not to what they promise but to how they behave. This simple rule could prevent much of the pain and misunderstanding that infect human relationships....We are drowning in words, many of which turn out to be lies we tell ourselves or others. How many times do we have to feel betrayed and surprised at the disconnect between people's words and their actions before we learn to pay more attention to the latter than the former?"

Gordon Livingston, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart

but I don't WANNA go to bed!

Since I was born, from all reports, I've never wanted to go to sleep when it's time. Mom tells of putting me in my crib and coming back hours later to find me up and chattering away to all my stuffed animals. I have vivid recollections of tormenting babysitters who were standing at the door with their hand on the light switch, detaining them with an endless series of questions - "What's Jr Hi like? What time do you start your day? What class do you have first? What class do you have second?" etc. I have even more vivid recollections from high school years of my insomniac Mom, being up herself, noticing my light on, or even the light from the stereo which was on becasue I was listening to the radio, and coming in, getting my attention and getting me to take the headphones off, and yelling at me to go to sleep right now.

So, nothing has changed. Well, except the invention of the internet, and broadband. I find myself exactly here, night after night, checking the SMH homepage one last time, checking my Gmail, looking at the Ok Go homepage, reading some more posts on All Men Are Liars before he went on vacation, coming back to the SMH again. What am I looking for? I ask myself all the time, but I know. I'm looking for my love, I'm seeing if he has said good night, I'm waiting for my good night kiss before I go to bed.

I thought tonight I'd try saying good night to all of you instead, and see if that works. Good night! Sweet dreams! Sleep well! Love you!

The top triangle

Last night I went to a movie and when the ads were showing at the start, the logo for the ad management company came on as it always does - a neon sign in a lawn at night that says "Hopscotch" in a boxy cursive script. I heard a guy behind me say to the guy he was with, "I know the guy who made that."

"What, made the sign?"

"The whole thing, he designed the whole Hopscotch thing for them."

This struck me as the kind of conversation you have in Sydney all the time. Everyone knows everyone who makes things that the rest of the country sees. Almost every day on TV I see something shot in my neighborhood - well, exactly every day because I watch Sunrise in the morning over breakfast and it's shot in Martin Place which is exactly a 45 minute walk from my house and I used to walk right past there every morning to go to work. Once on the ABC there was a documentary on people who are addicted to Ice (crystal meth), and the whole thing was shot in exactly my neighborhood, my main street, my grocery store.

The Hopscotch remark got me thinking about this. Living this close to the centre of the biggest city in the country, it's like living in the top tip of a pyramid. You live close to where everything gets made for the whole rest of the country, but you never see the rest of the country because your attention is directed toward the pinnacle. As far as my experience of my own life and culture is concerned, the whole of Australia could be this little town of folks from here to the Opera House, boundaried at the train tracks on one side and South Dowling Street on the other, with about 10,000 people in it. Everyone who makes anything lives here - TV, film, books, movies (well, movies if you extend past South Dowling to include Moore Park - where they shot the Matrix movies and Happy Feet), ads, magazines, all the money in the country, airlines, consumer goods (Johnson & Johnson but not Kimberly Clark, maybe we'll have to include out to Luna Park on the other side of the bridge). And of course web sites!

On occasions when I've gone to rock concerts with my friend the rock journalist, even when there was room to stand in the very front row and he went up there, I liked to hang back a bit because to me, an important part of the experience is not just watching the band but also seeing the people, getting a sense of the crowd and feeling like part of them. Maybe living where I do is like standing in the front row. You don't get any sense of the crowd behind you - it might be a little club of 20 other people, it might be a huge stadium of 300,000.

That's what I was thinking at the movie theatre last night.

Stealing dream

Night before last I had a dream that I was in a house, my house (but I think it was also the ancestral family home), with S. and my sister. It was a big white wooden house, all one one level. We were in the front room, a spare room, sitting on the edge of the bed by the far wall, looking at something together, I think maybe reading a book or a letter. My mobile phone rang, I went around the other side of the bed to answer it, but then I saw the battery had been replaced by a wrist watch. I realised someone must have just done it to stop it ringing, and then I said, "Shit!", and S. said, "What?" sort of alarmed, and then I tried to sound calm saying, "No, it might be nothing," and I went to the front door and realised that yes, I hadn't locked it when I had come in, and then I said, "Shit!" again. "Someone's in the house, it's my fault, I didn't lock the door when I came in."

I went and shut the door of the spare room, and the rest of us started looking around to see if anything was gone. My sister looked on kind of a sideboard and things looked disturbed, there had been a big pile of things there and there were not many things there now. The drawers had been opened. Something of S's was missing that I can't remember now - maybe a signed photo of a scientist or mathematician? Something flat that had been in a stack of books and other flat things in a drawer.

It occurred to me that the thief would have been right on the other side of the bed from us when he took out the phone battery, and we hadn't noticed at all, we were absorbed in what we were doing.

I went back to the spare room, which still had the door closed, and realised there was someone in it, pushing against the door. I pushed back and cried out to the others, but then opened the door and started screaming at the guy, "Get out! Get out!" It was a youngish man with red hair that fuzzed out on the sides, sort of young and wiry but not too skinny. He started running, scared by me, and went out a side door. I saw him running away across the lawn and across the neighbor's lawn.

Then I went and looked out the window of the spare room and saw another man looking down. He was a bit older, looked kind of dopey, and was dressed in grey. Suddenly I had it worked out - I asked my sister to keep talking to the other man to keep him there. I went out the front door and looked, and there was a bag, like a pillow case, dropped outside the window of the spare room. I went and picked it up and there was all our stolen stuff, including some silver things like a coffee pot and little urn. I felt very clever - I had worked out that the thief had dropped the stuff outside the window, but since I had scared him away he hadn't had a chance to pick it up before running away.

So, something was stolen from me, but I managed to get it back.

I felt absolutely wonderful when I woke up that morning.

Fluey

The worst feeling in the world is when you're getting a cold but it's right at the beginning and you haven't worked out yet what it is. You feel tired, you might feel achy, you drag a bit and don't have as much energy as usual. You might have a tickle in the throat or down in the lungs, or maybe a soreness or a little cough. You might feel hot - especially confusing if the seasons have just turned and it's the first bit of hot weather. There's just a whole systemic feeling of not-rightness, not-as-good-as-usual-ness. Before the symptoms get a bit worse and clarify themselves, it always feels like something huge and bad and permanent is happening. Arthritis? Recurrence of sinus or asthma problems? Decline in fitness, despite exercise, which means you need to do even more just to feel normal and keep yourself on an even keel? Maybe the mental realisation that everything is bad and in decline and not worth doing - because negative thoughts follow the aches and tiredness. Before the symptoms get worse, you have this feeling in your whole body, a feeling of decline, but it feels like it's something permanent that signals a downward trend in your life until you end up dead.

In a day or two, when you actually get a bad cough or a fever or a stuffy nose, or maybe you get a proper flu with fever and chills and shakes and loss of appetite, then it's clear that you're just sick, and most importantly, that you'll get better. Even though the symptoms are worse, the experience is better, because you know what it is and you don't have to worry. Illnesses get better, bodies heal, and the common cold is one of the least worrying things that can happen to you.

Happy New Year 2007

Happy New Year! It's Jan 1 here in Sydney, the start of a brand new year that I have a feeling is bound to be great - bound to at least be an improvement on last year, touch wood.

Here's a positive New Year's thought, something I've been doing during my first week off of work. To prioritise my to do lists and get myself motivated to do things, I've been thinking, "How can I be my best self?"

I sort of realised that usually when I have a list of possible things I could do and I'm trying to pick one or movitate myself to get going, I have traditionally assessed my overall happiness and entertainment state, and have asked myself questions more like, "Am I entertained enough? Pampered enough? What could I do to feel more entertained and pampered?" This is probably why my credit cards have looked like they do. But I've lately been trying to do more goal-oriented decision making - like at work, I think, what's my goal here? Goal is to be a solid employee and in a position where I could ask for a raise. So, what will get me there? How about not bursting into tears but just dealing with these emails? That kind of thing. This week the things I've been doing for my Best Self include going to the gym, eating sort of healthy, and doing my homework - reading philosophy books that people have given me that they want to discuss with me. My Best Self is a girl who does her homework on time. She is healthy and fit and ready for anything. And her dishes are done.

I've found this effective and rather inspiring, so I can recommend it as a strategy. I'm probably sounding horribly American and Anthony-Robbins-like, aren't I? In fact I think the strategy is the very essence of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But anyway, it's January 1st, New Year's, and so it's in fitting with the theme of the day for this kind of talk.

Happy New Year.