Nice Grey Film

Usually Susan Maushart in the The Australian makes me cringe, but I really liked one turn of phrase in her piece from today. The piece is about how this young generation is incapable of experiencing joy, and in this paragraph she wonders if it isn't some sort of managerial strategy. Here's the bit I liked:

Quasi-orgasmic joy and frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy are all very well and good in their place. But there's nothing like a nice grey film of sub-clinical depression when you're trying to meet your monthly targets.

Susan Maushart, The Weekend Australian Magazine, April 28-29 2007, p.11

Sakura

A while I go I found a little Japanese place along Pitt Street called Sakura. I've never been there with anyone else, but I've been on my own quite a few times now - sometimes after Dialectics, before the gang started going out to dinner afterward, and sometimes after work on my way somewhere else, and sometimes on my way home from the City. Sushi Suma notwithstanding, it has some of the best sushi and sashimi around, and the main addictive thing that draws me back is the Agedashi Tofu. Delicately fried, soft as little clouds, the colour of a perfectly toasted marshmellow, in delicious and somehow soul-satisfying sauce, and gorgeous, ethereal, floating bonito flakes, that slowly melt in the moisture and become their own kind of companion sauce.

The staff is all from Japan and really Japanese - they yell out "Irashaemase" the minute you penetrate the fabric curtains at the threshold, and they cry out, "Arigato gozaimasu!" when you get up to leave.

Tonight I went there and resisted the temptation to order something new - Katsu chicken or tempura don or tofu-and-veggies don - and went with the small California roll plate and the favourite, Agedashi Tofu. And then I also wanted some miso soup, so I said to the waitress, "and miso soup?" And she said, carefully, "Miso soup is already involved."

little prayer of love

a little prayer of love to everyone out there.

love, everyone! little prayer of love to you

musing on academic libraries

Musing on the offices of senior academic staff. Wood desks, wood shelves floor to ceiling. They always had not just aging books with aging leather binding in red or gree, filling every shelf and stacked horizontally on top, but also stacks of old journals, and manila envelopes with curling yellow papers sticking out, faint pencil scrawl topics on the tabs. Stacks and stacks of them.

As a young student going into one of these offices, it seemed like it contained all the books from the past up to now. Your mind was shiny and new, and you were just starting, but this office had in it everything that had gone before, complete.

When you then get your own books and your own office, and your own books start to go yellow, you know that the academic's library only reflects a short period of time when they happened to be working - something like forty years of accumulated literature, that's all. A haphazard collection, a tiny little slice of the available literature from history. Still yellow, still venerable, would still look quite deep and historical to a shiny-minded beginner, but you know how accidental and temporary and incomplete it really is, and will always be until the day you happen to die and your collecting days happen to finish.

overcoming suffering

Buddhist monk at the end of the documentary Sexual Utopias (cheerfully):

"Everybody dies. Everybody dies. Everything in the world is in a permanent state of impermanence."

Is it true that if one truly and deeply embraces this, one can live without suffering?

p.s.

And look what Salem Tarot said was in my "future":

Two of Pentacles
Juggling two situations at once with ease, the person in the Two of Pentacles personifies the choices we make every day. Like the ships on the rough seas behind him, he has experienced ups and downs in the endless tide of life, symbolized by the infinity sign in the pattern surrounding the pentacles. Every new choice made brings change, a new opportunity, and a fresh start. It is said that the only thing constant is change. You will triumph in this situation if you remain flexible and adapt, rather than resist.

quoted from Salem Tarot 3 card reading, www.salemtarot.com

Commuting

I read an interesting article in the New Yorker on commuting. It was in the travel issue, which was interesting because commuting to work is a kind of travel most of us do, but it isn't often discussed. The author identified about five people with officially "extreme commutes" of an hour or more each way. He met them at work and drove home with them to see what it was like. One was in New York City (she lives in rural Pennsylvania, it's more than three hours each way), and the rest were in Atlanta, which the author said is one of the worst cities in the country because other ones are bounded by an ocean or something but Atlanta is free to sprawl in all directions.

He reported some sociologist who described the triangle made by three points: where you live, where you work and where you shop. The smaller the sides of this triangle, the happier people tend to be, and the longer the sides, the more socially isolated they are. It made me feel very happy about my work and house - my walk to work is very short, and I live right across the street from a grocery store and it will be very hard to ever not do so in the future. But I've also done a long commute, 1 1/2 hours each way for three years, so I could identify with the people in the story too.

He also said that commutes baffle economists because they dimish the overall value of a job, which people can realise, but they still don't do anything to fix it. Economists would predict that if the overall value of a job is diminished the employee would quit and do something else, which they do for other kinds of decreased value. But commutes seem to be more like smoking, or saving money - everyone knows the right thing to do, but no one has the willpower or gumption to do anything about it.

The people in his story did end up at some pretty nice places once they got home. So you could sort of see the attraction. But they had no lives and poor health, in service of those places (get up at 4:30 every morning, don't get home until 8:45 at night). What a strange world we live in.

Years ago I met a man at a philosophy conference who worked at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and one of the projects he had his students do was to design a city where everyone could walk to work. What would that kind of world be like?

How it all went

How did I get through it all? In tears by 10:30 in the morning, first of all. And before even that my computer had a complete psychological breakdown and wouldn't boot (just as Astro Barry predicted). But things improved all day after that and now, almost exactly 24 hours later, I feel pretty good.

The tears were caused by two very bad clients on a very difficult project, that we were late on but they never gave us a proper brief, and now they were screaming at me and wanting everything yesterday and were both exceptionally rude in each email, just uncalled for rudeness. Yesterday I threatened out loud to the boss that if they sent one more email like that I was going to remove myself from the project, and today I got two of them, straight away, and just melted down. But he offered to ring the most difficult one, and we set our terms and stood our ground, and by the end of the day their boss was on the phone and I was very reasonable and professional, and she's actually got more than one neuron to rub together, and so it got sorted out. Still a lot to do, in a flap and panic at the last minute, but at least there's a reasonable person at the other end helping. I felt very professional and like a competent customer service manager when the boss lady called, and my own boss assured me that I hadn't failed in the project, some people are just like this.

One good thing out of the day was that because my computer was broken I had to use the computer of a designer of ours who only works on Wednesday and Thursday, and that's right next to the boss, in the same cubicle. When I became a teary mess so soon after arriving, I was sure he didn't want me near, but when I went and ate lunch at my old desk because there's more room he said, "Ellen! Don't go!" which surprised me, and at the end of the day he kept saying how nice it was to have me there. It would be strategically heaps better to sit there, I could keep track of what he's saying to customers, the other project manager is closer, he's there to ask quick questions of with less interruption, and the best thing is exchanging smiles when the other employees are ranting across the cubicle wall and saying silly things. He asked me heaps more questions today. It would be easy for me to move, if he wants me to, and the junior designer isn't settled in anywhere and is so mellow it wouldn't even occur to him to care. So there could be a good outcome from my computer's nervous breakdown. We'll see.

Another good thing was how the day ended, with a positively lovely evening with a dear friend who's here from out of town. She's staying at the Intercontinental tonight and my place tomorrow, and we met there in the lounge for a drink before dinner and a walk around Circular Quay. Lovely spot, the Intercontinental, very elegant but also quite warm. It was great to catch up with her, and to realise just how far we go back, and to feel that feeling of a solid and lovely friendship.

Now I'm washing sheets so she'll have somewhere to sleep tomorrow, and will have to straighten and things very early tomorrow before my volunteering gig, so the whole sleep thing is still really just not happening, but as I said, that's what long international plane flights are for.

Check in with y'all soon for continuing reports.

Insomnia my favorite drug

I haven't been getting enough sleep. Well, enough, obviously, in fact probably more than the strictly minimum amount I need to keep minimally alive. But less-than-optimal enough that I've been feeling like I have brain damage at work, and am not being very proactive or strategic or senior-ish or living up to the position or salary I resent my boss for not giving me.

We had a four-day weekend recently, the only one all year, but I still didn't get enough sleep and still didn't feel rested.

All the gaps in my weekend have filled up - Friday night dinner out with a friend who's in town, Saturday early go to the Art Gallery, but even earlier than that get up and change the sheets because said friend is staying at my place Saturday night, so I'll want to spend time with her of course, but it does mean no sleeping until 1pm on Sunday morning, and then Sunday night dinner with the daughter of some friends of mine and the friends, and we always drink too much wine and I stay too late at their place so on Monday I'm sure I will be in even worse shape...

"But Ellen", you say, "Isn't next Wednesday a public holiday too?" Guess what - Art Gallery early again! And again on Saturday, and something on Saturday afternoon, and on and on it goes.

So how do I cope with this? Come home from work and go straight to bed? No - Biggest Loser and then grocery shopping and then make dinner and watch the last Sopranos and also listen to the commentary, and do all the dishes and do laundry and hang it all up. And then watch a bit more tv and read a bit and then wander up here thinking maybe I'll have an email from someone and I did, and found a new blog by a friend who I didn't know had a blog until last weekend, and played with the Medusa oracles ("Is __ thinking of me right now?" "Thinking, they are talking about you!"). Read the SMH a bit. Posted the Sunk Cost post (see just previous). Now posting this. It's like I want to push to the limit of tiredness. It's like I want to chemically alter myself so I feel something extreme. It's like it would be easier to get through tomorrow with four hours of sleep than with seven. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? And how much longer can I do it?

I have a holiday coming up soon. Four long plane trips, all up. Time to be on my own and think thoughts and rest.

Actually, I might just be pushing myself to chemically alter my brain so I feel something extreme because I'm bored. I'm spectacularly bored at work. Besides the trip, I have nothing in particular to look forward to (unless __ really is thinking of me right now...are you?). I met a woman recently who said that when she was a manager she would only hire Geminis, she contrived to always find out birthdays and would only hire early June birthdays, and they were the best workers in the world, but, she said, "You can't let them get bored." You can't let us get bored. My boss is one of us so he should know better than anyone. If things don't work out, if our paths diverge, he has only himself to blame.

1:30 in the morning. On a school night. Bloody hell. How am I going to get through it all?

I will, though. I will let you know how.

Sunk costs

I have been familiar with the concept of sunk costs for a while. We studied it in my MBA, and even before that my ex had a good grasp of it. The idea is that after money is spent, it's spent, and so it shouldn't weigh into decision making about value or further investment.

Then I ran across the concept again in Fred Hilmer's book about being the CEO of Fairfax (not a bad little book, by the way - my boss lent it to me). He explained the concept by asking us to imagine we've already invested $10 million in a project, and it was not yet viable, it would require another $1m investment to become viable and have a chance of turning a profit. Many people would say, well, I've already invested $10 million, I'd better see it through to make that money worthwhile. But as he rightly pointed out, that's not a good way to make investment decisions (the technical term for it is I believe "throwing good money after bad"). The $10 m is already spent, it's gone, it's as if it gets reset to zero. Your decision is really, should you invest $1 m in a project that is not looking very viable at the moment. Answer should be no.

So, I shouldn't be feeling guilty that I haven't been going to Wittgenstein class. I went to two, but have now missed four, of a total of 16 (and will miss at least two more from being out of town). It was kind of expensive, I spent some of my bonus on the tuition, but that money's gone now, spent. The decision whether to go or not, on any given Thursday, can be made from scratch, as if from zero. It was kind of instructive going to the first two, but I realised that I like the amateur groups better than the paid groups, and there are lots of loud-mouths in the class who dominate and say not very interesting things. I already know more about the subject matter than most folks in the class. And Thursday's not a good night - always the night I have to stay back and finish things for the end of the week, I'm always exhausted but can't sprint the last little bits of energy because I have all of Friday to get through, and tonight I have laundry and grocery shopping to do which both some more important and more rewarding. I keep calculating the decision from scratch and keep deciding not to go. How guilty should I feel?

If I imagine my sunk cost as a charitable contribution to the teacher, for which I get nothing in return, I don't feel too bad about it because she's a good person and a good teacher for that kind of thing and I'm happy to support her. And even if she doesn't get very much of the tuition fee and most of it goes to the CCE, that's a good cause as well, I'm glad it exists and am happy to support it, as the organisation that brought me Opera class and changed my life. In fact, if I imagine that part of this tuition was actually the full cost of Opera class, it's still worth it, because I would have paid the total amount just for those six weeks and that experience.

So I shouldn't feel guilty. I may not go to Wittgenstein class again at all. No refunds available, no tax deductions given, but that's okay. The money is sunk. But it's what I do with each new Thursday that is the important decision.

Better

I had a bit of blogger's remorse after the last post, but instead of deleting it I thought I'd blog about the posting of it instead. I've always sunk into those kinds of moods from time to time. They used to be associated with many tears, and roping a boy into consoling me. I know that when I was in college (trans for Australians: "at Uni"), I had a running set of male friends who I would call on when my mood plummetted, and I would cry and they would sit there and say there, there. The main boy got drafted into this role of course when we got together, but he was never happy with it. He usually got angry and resentful rather than indulgent and comforting. One time he got angry with me when I didn't stay in that mood permanently, because from the volume of tears he had thought my world was permanently collapsing - when I felt better the next day and could go to work and keep the brave face, he got really angry at my inconsistency. So, he wasn't the best comforter, really. And in the teary epsiodes that accompanied our splitting up, he said things that suggested he had consulted a team of lawyers, like when I was panicking about never finding a job and running out of money, "You are just as secure as you ever were." Which of course was f-a secure.

So one great benefit of having to repair myself all on my own, post-breakup, is that I think I have finally grown up and got some mastery of my emotions. No teary episodes any more, not for ages actually. I don't have someone on tap I can ring to weep upon and comfort me. I'm not sure I even want that to be part of a new relationship - emotional support, sure, but not emotional crutches. So, that new strength is perhaps a benefit of the new situation.

Nonetheless, even though the tears and manipulation might not happen so much any more, the moods still occur. They're part of me, and have been for as long as I remember, so it's honest to write them down here. You can always skip over them if, unlike my male friends at Uni but like my Ex, you get bored and resentful when I start going on that way.

***

Actually talked quite a bit of philosophy yesterday (yes, with the lying liar, who would have guessed?), and sorted out something about my approach to ethics. My interlocutor wants to treat ethics and self-interest separately - ethics is what you ought to do or not do in the interests of other people, and the other he calls "prudence" - prudence is what you ought to do or not do in your own interests. This has all sorts of interesting consequences, some of which are that he thinks people should be able to do pretty much whatever they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else - like do heroin, amputate perfectly healthy limbs or commit suicide. I disagree with all of this, and I think the reason is that in my ethics, all people are considered equally. Ethics is to preserve the greatest good for the greatest number (with all the usual caveats and extra sophistication to get the math to work, I'm sure Wikipedia has a page on Utilitarianism that will go through them), and the individual is just one of the people. There's nothing different about my interests and the general interest. So it's wrong for me to commit suicide, even if I might want to, because murder is wrong - you shouldn't murder anyone, including yourself. And it's okay to make laws against doing heroin because no one should do heroin because it's bad for them. I'm very happy with these outcomes, so I'm convinced my "everyone should be treated equally" moral stance is the right one. Now just have to convince the other guy...

Drunken posting

My favorite drink for getting absolutely maggotted lately is the Evans and Tate Classic White, a lovely, crisp, citrussy Margaret River drop of sunshine that after exactly two glasses feels like a very powerful prescription-only sedative. Two glasses is all I had this time. I had three-ish the time before, after the soup dinner with the lying liar when my brain thought we had made a reconciliation but my body knew it was the end of an era and the end of all hope, and I proceeded to turn my hangover into a whole week of stomach flu and even missed my office Christmas party (on Chinese New Year but who's counting?). This time I've just had several solid weeks of heart-pounding, neck squeezing, eye-aching stress, non-stop, all day, every day at work, and so I can't do anything but work any more, can't read any books, can't go out, can't call anyone even when it's just work or an errand, and have been missing meetings all the time because I just don't have the energy. And today, admidst no less than nine incredibly urgent, COB today, world will end deadlines, we had an incredibly stressful launch of a new thing for our biggest client, and they are not happy because it's so late and so not working properly yet, but it's beautiful and full of potential and no one knows what hard work it was to do even this. Exciting work, web work, but thankless, like being an IT sys admin - everyone just wants it to work, all the time, seamlessly and quickly, and they only notice when it's not.

So I was there until 7, with the last man standing, finishing the last deadline, putting out the last forest fire. And then so wanted to burst out of the office and into a dark but cozy pub, and drink lots of beers and have several beers bought for me, and laugh and relax and regale everyone - "You won't believe the week I've had! You won't believe what we had to do today!" My horoscope even recommended it as a good day to relax and have fun with loved ones.

But I have no loved ones. I got $60 out on my credit card, because the pays don't go thru until tomorrow, and took myself out - aforementioned bottle of white, two lots of new Sopranos at Blockbuster, then bagels and toppings at the shop - my dinner, not breakfast or snack but dinner, was two whole poppy seed bagels with brie, paté and hoummus on top. And then I just had a Mountain Bread with four slices of cheese melted on it, which is my new fave snack. I just don't care. I'm bingeing. Carbo-festival. It's Friday. And I had a hell of a couple of weeks.

It's not completely new, I remember this same feeling of shock and abandonment at Uni when Friday would come and the routine in which I felt comfortable and excelled myself came to an abrupt stop and I had planned nothing for the weekend. The same shock and loneliness and feeilngs of "Nooooo! No! I don't want to do nothing! I don't want to be on my own! I want to go out and play! Why won't anybody play with me!" So, I'm sure I am still the same amount to blame for my predicament. But it hurts no less. In fact a bit more - I felt this way when I was 18, and here I am nearly 44 and I feel the same way still? It sucks, is what it does.

I am at the point now when I don't even know how to start to get out of this situation. The Philosophers have let me down, I'm not getting what I need from them and last time I saw them it just felt sad and defeated and second-best, and when I have the opportunity to see them I don't prioritise it any more (and certainly don't feel like I can't be my best self without them), I just feel it's all too hard and when I weigh it up against just going home and lying down in front of Biggest Loser (ironic, no?), I just pike and go home. Face it boys, I joined Philorum so I could get laid, and I'm not getting laid, and so I need to spend my time elsewhere.

Mercedes boy is not worth my time even worrying about, and besides which he doesn't call or write.

The online downloadable advice books, the free snippets I've read, are all the same - on one page telling you to have confidence in yourself and just be true to yourself and genuine and really love yourself and others, and on the next page say "Don't call him! If you even send an email first you will appear desparate and run him off FOREVER!" Fuck.

RSVP looked even more sad and desparate and damaged and sad than the philosophers last time I visited. I just can't face it again. Especially knowing me - what are the odds I'd find even a friend there, given how I work? The odds are zero, it will never, ever happen, I just don't work that way.

But I can't trust myself around Mr Averageness of the Universe Internet Guy, because I recoil and lash out and hurt them when they don't deserve it, and I can't trust myself about Mercedes Guy because he's a player and not boyfriend material and Just Not That Into Me and loaded with baggage anyway, and I couldn't trust myself with the lying liar because somehow even with sex taken explicitly out of the equation I still managed to come across as desparate and dangerous and made a fool of myself. Who am I going to meet? I mean, you can't even meet anyone anyway, Australians are incapable of friendships with anyone they didn't know in Year 10, and people in the general world won't make eye contact, and at classes everyone listens to the teacher and heads home, and the philosophers are all too shy or clueless or whatever to actually call me and say, "What are you doing? What are you doing right now? It's Friday, it's after work, meet me for a drink!" No fun. No people. No connections.

I'm not sure how long I can stand any of this, the stressy work, the no connections, the feeling old and life slipping away. I can't even read any more, much less write, much less sustain philosophical thought (brain damage from the car accident? the stressy job? the broken heart? or the half-bottle of wine?), much less have ambitions to write a novel at all, much less successful ones, much less important ones, much less have any impact on the fucking world at all. Work is all I can do, and even that I can barely do any more and here I am on a Friday night.

You're lucky I didn't drink the whole bottle of wine or this would be ten times more boring than it even is.

I can't think of anyone who I could be like this with any more, this morose and sorry-self way. I keep feeling really guilty of taking so much space to moan and complain here. But it's a blog! It's free space for boring and self-pitying speech! It's not a newspaper. It's not even a diary! I don't have to pay for these pages, or this ink (pixels) to make these letters. It's all on Google!

Thanks, Google.

I imagine a Dialectic. I imagine striding off through the flower gardens with a friendly interlocutor. I imagine him asking, "So, what have you been thinking about?" And the answer is only, "If I don't get laid soon, I am going to die."

Real profound, Watson.

Sunday night blues on an Easter Monday...

argh, back to work again tomorrow

Ed Kuepper on YouTube

YouTube has everything. Friday night I was watching the first part of the 20th anniversary of Rage on the ABC (1987-1991 so actually commemorating the time I spent in San Diego before I even moved here), and I was thinking back to when I very first watched Rage (1992, when I got to Brisbane), and then I thought of a video I saw only one time ever, a song by Ed Kuepper who if you don't know was once the guitar player of the most important band in the world, The Saints, who wrote the song (I'm) Stranded which was the first ever punk song in the world, if you don't count 1969 by Iggy Pop and the Stooges 7 years earlier. Anyway, the video I was thinking of was for a much later solo Ed Kuepper song called "The Way I Made You Feel". I remembered it had a slow pan of modest Brisbane suburban houses, and it created a very moody and emotional atmosphere.

And I searched for it on YouTube and found it! It's still a great song, it's still moody, but a bit less emotional - now that I've been in the country for so long I don't pine for nondescript suburbs and something sentimental and newly mine, they are now places I'd rather not go back to, actually. And there's much less footage of the houses than I remembered. But it's still worth a look:

The Life of a Customer Servant

Tonight I just couldn't face it any more. Weeks and weeks at work of being in a blind panic, knowing that we're not really doing the top job for customers, but when they ring I say, "Hi!" sunnily like I'm happy to hear from them, and just as I put down the phoning saying, "Holy fuck" to myself and am writing an email to chase something up and solve the problem, the phone rings again, another one of them, where is the thing, are we on track to finish the thing by COB today, and I speak sunnily to them too while praying to god I don't forget to press send on the other urgent thing that's sitting half-done.

And the boss walks by and goes, "Can you..." and to every sentence the boss says that starts "Can you..." I smile sunnily and say, "Yep!" And to his sentences that go, "How's the...." I say sunnily, "Under control! Coming along!"

And last night I made a plan to avert boring and depressing Good Friday to go see my bestest friends, and I took white wine and they wanted to drink red, and I took hot cross buns and they hate them so I brought them back home again, and I wanted to leave an hour before I did because I was exhausted and had an early start today, but there was no break in the conversation. And the conversation was they bicker. And enough red wine was drunk that they were nearly starting to fight, it was almost getting a bit nasty. My friends. My bestest friends, my surrogate family. She would scornfully contradict every single thing he said, instead of every fourth or fifth thing like usual, and he would cut her off every single sentence she said and he would start a loud, pompositous pronouncement, three words before the end of every single sentence of hers. She called him an idiot. He laughed scornfully when she made some throw-away comment about sometimes not being hungry. But then the worst thing was, I know I go over there and they feed me all the time, but then I can't exactly invite them to eat because they know I can't cook and they'd laugh and scorn and would say, "YOU're cooking? You want us to come over and eat something YOU cooked? Oh, honey, let's go out! Ha ha ha." But then I was floating the information that sometime in the next few months I'll have to cook dinner for my new book club, and wanted to run some ideas past them, and when I said that she laughed scornfully and grabbed him and said to him, "Oh, for a second I thought she was going to invite us over! Ha ha ha." So, that sounded like something mean and scornful, like, we always feed her and does she ever invite us in return? People can feel scornful things like that and never say anything and just keep saying "Yeah, sure, stay for dinner" when you go over but it leaks out, if they feel it, it leaks out and poisons the relationship. And also, since she is my surrogate mother I can't help feeling, like I do with my real mother, that there's some unspoken obligation that I'm supposed to be doing that I don't know about and haven't been told or asked but I'm going to get in trouble for not doing, just need to keep trying things and guessing what it is and hope I get everything covered, and then there it is, drunken snipe, I am supposed to invite them over for dinner and I haven't yet, even though I do mean to and am working up to it and looking for an opportunity, but there's the resentment and judgementalness, leaking out like poison. Also, I'm a bit worried about them because they're being so mean to each other, and she's obviously not the same from the grief over her dog, and over her daughter and grandkids moving away, but to tell the truth it was the invite-for-dinner laughing thing that upset me the most. So, that's not straightforward either. And then, when they were sniping at each other and cutting off each other's sentences for an hour, I thought, they aren't listening. They don't listen. They aren't checking to see if I'm okay, or too tired, or looking like I have to go. I love them, but I was smiling sunnily for them too, and it was all fake and today I feel a bit bruised and a bit upset.

And then today I was at the Art Gallery. Archibald season, my first time on the Archibald desk. And it was pouring rain all day, so it was super-crowded. I did the afternoon shift which is extra-long. We were running out of change. People were crowding up before I had the notes put away from the previous person. People were putting $12 on a credit card, couldn't fish twelve measly dollars out of their wallets, and I had the especially temperamental credit card machine, I had to tear up about four slips today that didn't print properly and start again. Line up the stairs, impatient wet people, a $12 charge, and they say, "Credit?" and flip their wallet-warped card at me and I wince to myself and think, oy vey please help me god not misprint this or split their card in half, which has happened, especially with wallet-warped cards, and I smile sunnily and go, "Credit? Sure!"

So, is it any wonder that at 5pm when I was supposed to catch up with the philosophers and the lovely but potentially very needy sickly one who can't make decisions, who was supposed to make a plan to watch movies at his house tonight all together for Easter but never wrote or called with any specifics, is it any wonder that although I walked toward where they were I just couldn't face them tonight, a big group all yammering meaninglessly like boys always do, and no one would listen to me and no one wanted to care how grumpy I was or that my surrogate parents were snipey or that I'm exhausted from smiling at people when I want to BARK and YELL and CRY instead, would any of them care or even understand what that's like? I just couldn't face it. I sent a text message to one, which didn't do the trick because I got a phone message 45 minutes later from another, but I just couldn't face it. I do in fact feel like I'm getting a cold. I just want to curl in a ball and watch tv at my own house (fortunately, god smiled upon me and delivered The Sopranos Season 6 Disc 1 into my hands). I want to be with someone with whom I am free to be in a bad mood. Not a single fucking soul in this town. So just on my own then.

I can't smile one more sunny smile. I can't smile and listen to conversations that I don't care about. I have to go back to the Art Gallery tomorrow and do it all again, although not giving change this time, just tickets to the free film. Happy fucking Easter. I need to talk to someone with whom I can just be real, and complain about work but then they won't think my work is bad, because it's great, and I need to complain about the customers at the Art Gallery with someone who knows that the Art Gallery and all the customers are great and my favourite thing, and I wish someone was in my house where I could just collapse and cry because it's all too exhausting, but there's not. So I'm doing it here by myself.

Sunny customer service girl to return Tuesday. Or else. Don't worry. I'll be sunny and fine again soon. But not, fucking not, fucking not tonight.

Maundy Thursday thoughts

Tonight is the first part of Easter Weekend, which here in Aus is a four-day weekend, a fact that still delights me even though I'm pretty used to it now. I left work (the usual amount of stress just before a weekend, the boss wasn't even there, but I brought beers out for those who wanted them and one of the designers put on some music so it wasn't too depressing), and went into town to buy a present for my hairdresser who is leaving me and moving to Melbourne. The City was really busy, lots of people coming from work and lots of teens on school holidays, lots of young women shopping, almost festive. You have to buy everything at late-night shopping tonight because tomorrow absolutely nothing in the whole country will be open. I learned that in Brisbane early on, one year when I thought, great, day off, I'll run a whole bunch of errands. No, don't think so. You will sit very still in your house and think about the sacrifice our Lord made for you, won't you? Tomorrow I've made plans to bunker down with some atheist friends and drink wine and have hot cross buns. Did my shopping tonight.

I got my hairdresser an umbrella which I thought was appropriate for someone moving to Melbourne, and the umbrellas are right next to the silly hats and feather "fascinators", which huge groups of girls were trying on - because the Easter Racing Carnival is all weekend (horse racing). Hilarious, I've never seen that ritual ever before - the gaggle of girlfriends all going out together and admiring themselves in normal street clothes with coloured feathers on their head.

In the loo down by the food court I found some accidental art. Someone had removed some stickers from a newly purchased garment. So on the wall was one transparent sticker, a long strip with lots of 8's on it, it said, "8 8 8 8 8". Which is by the way very lucky in Chinese. And then next to that was a circular sticker, also transparent, with black words on it that said, "Creases are not permanent." Well, no, I guess they're not.

My most memorable Maundy Thursday last-day-of-work-before-the-long-Easter-weekend was when I was working at Amway, so I guess 1998. Pointy-head was away, I'm sure up in Brissy with his kid. At work most people had ducked out early to do big drives to go away to some holiday spot for the weekend. I had left the lights on in the Jag, and one of the power windows just a little bit open. I had to call NRMA to come jump me, so I was the very, very last one to leave the parking lot at like 7:30 at night, and it was pouring rain, buckets, sheets of it, flooding down and of course getting in the car because the window was down and the battery was dead and so I couldn't put it back up again.

NRMA came, the car started, I headed up the freeway home - that was when I had an hour and a half drive each way on the F3 every day - I headed up the freeway in the traffic and the rain. I don't even remember the drive very well, just soldiered on bravely and kept heading for home. I remember that when I hit Kariong I decided to go down into Gosford instead of on Woy Woy road because I thought it might be too dangerous, but the road down into Gosford was just as winding and scary, and then the road back all along Brisbane Waters was nearly flooding so the whole trip was just alarming all the way around. And what I remember most was when, after crossing the Hawksbury, I could pick up SeaFM on the radio, and turned it on and heard the DJ giving a traffic report, saying there was flooding and heavy traffic and low visibility and a large tree was down blocking the fast lane just the other side of Jolls Bridge. And then he said, "It doesn't get any better than this, does it? Happy Easter."

***

Another little mantra thing that's been in my head lately is when I think an old thought of ambition and unfulfillment, like "I should try to get a job in a big ad agency" or "I should ask for more money" or "Damn I still haven't written a book," a voice retorts saying, "Are you kidding? I'm lucky to be alive!" Like, just being alive is enough of an accomplishment, thank you very much, I don't think you all can ask any more of me. Is this a healthy thought? Probably - contentment and peace and lack of frustrated ambition and desire is supposed to be good for your brain. But then it's also a kind of post-traumatic survivor thought.

And, kind of related to that, especially to the desire thing, instead of the great yawning longing that I was feeling in my centre a few weeks ago, the great loneliness where the special Somebody should be, I've had another mantra thought that is also bringing me a strange kind of comfort. The virtuous state of mind behind it is that I need to not wallow in singledom and feel sorry for myself but maintain the friends I do have, appreciate them and make time for them. I'm not sure if that virtuous program or the mantra happened first, but the mantra is: "I have already met everyone I will ever meet." It's patently not true, of course, but it has been bringing me a strange kind of comfort. It takes the pressure off for having to Get Out There and Meet People and Date People and Find Someone, which I've been feeling like is supposed to be my main occupation (the same constant weight and drive as when I was looking for a job - all effort must be directed toward that goal, all day and every day - but a girl needs a break every now and again). I have already met everyone I will ever meet, the thought goes, so I need to make the most of that group of people, and also be satisfied with them. And I have been sending more emails and making more phone calls and catching up with my beloved friends, and I guess realising that they do love me, I do have love, I'm not alone. My glass is half full of friends, instead of yawning empty of a One.

***

Happy Easter everyone.

Movie quote

There's a quote from an otherwise forgettable, I thought, movie that comes back to me from time to time. It's from the movie The Aviator, and it's from a scene toward the end where Howard Hughes (Leonardo Di Caprio) has to get cleaned up for like a court appearance or something, and his then girlfriend, I forget, Lana Turner or somebody, played I think by that girl who's the star of Weeds (yes, I am too lazy to get on the IMDB in another browser window and look any of this up), anyway, she's helping him. His obsessive-compulsion is at its worst at this point. I think he's shaving. And the sink is full of shaving-creamy water and he has to rinse off his face and before he puts his hands in the sink he looks at the water very dubiously and says to her, "Does that look clean to you?"

And she says, "Nothin's clean, baby, but we do our best, don't we?"

I find these are good words to live by, oftentimes.

What's really coming after Modernism

Here's my theory of art. I've someting in noticed in all sorts of arenas lately that I think can tell us what's going to come after Modernism. No, it's not Post-Modernism, although that's a good guess! It's something else. It has to do with telling universal human stories, connecting with universal human emotions, and being true and sincere about them.

Here's where I've noticed these things.

Howard Arkley exhibition

I described this before. Arkley's first, student works were non-figurative geometric explorations in black and white. His first, student works! He was born in 1951 and educated in the early 1970's, and Modernism had stripped painting down to its bare, abstract essentials. So that's what he did first, but then he started painting things that meant something to him, and now he's most known for his triumphal, very realistic but also kind of surreal neon-coloured airbrush paintings of Australian suburban houses. When you see the exhibition, you can see that he was very talented and clever in the beginning, but the houses really stand apart. They're quite emotional, when you stand and regard them. The tour guide said that he said his paintings were not abstractions but constructions. The abstract painters started with realistic subjects and stripped away until they were left with bare essentials - Mondrian, right, vertical and horizontal lines, primary colours blue red and yellow, and shades black and white. So, after that, what's left to paint? Well, emotional scenes that are meaningful given one's early life, right? Technique gives way to story and biography and heart.

Review of a show of abstract painting in the New Yorker

Peter Schjeldahl in the March 19 New Yorker reviews two shows, one by an abstract painter who was working in the 1950's but is still alive, Robert Ryman, and one of young contemporary artists called "Comic Abstraction". Schjeldahl appreciates Ryman's very subtle and sophisticated work, but sort of admits that it's esoteric, and for experts only. He says of the youngsters, "Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recetn vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes." He gives examples of Frank Stella, Pollack, and Mondrian too, and says they are now just décor, just images everyone knows on a par with Mickey Mouse. He says, "The best modern abstract artists (produced) jolting demonstrations of art's intrinsic powers, independent of worldly reference. But their project proved self-defeating..." The Modernist paradigm has worked itself out. Contemporary abstraction is just an academic exercise. "What's lost", he says, "is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention."

Peter Schjeldahl, "Abstraction Problem", The New Yorker March 19, 2007, p. 147.

Choreographer Matthew Bourne

This is from The New Yorker too. I hope they don't come after me for copyright violation - I think I've quoted about the amount you're allowed in an academic paper, so we should be okay. This is from a profile of Matthew Bourne, whose Swan Lake, with all male swans, just played in Sydney and has been a huge world-wide hit. Bourne got into theatre as a kid, and hung aruond the West End watching shows and getting autographs, and had grown up watching musical comedies with his parents and even staging his own. Once he became a professional, the article says that Bourne started dancing with a modernist troupe where dance was all about movement, and that's it. He joined the Laban Centre dance school, without experience but they were desparate for men so accepted him. The article says, "This was in 1982, when in England modern dance was a young firled, and puritanically 'contemporary'. Dances, as the Laban faculty saw it, should have no stories, and they didn't really need music, either. a dance should be a 'movement study,' an exploration of structure. Bourne respected this aesthetic: 'I wanted to emulate that. I did try and do that.' But it didn't really work, because it wasn't what he really wanted to do. He wanted to tell stories."

Joan Acocella, "Swan's Way", The New Yorker March 12, 2007, p. 41.


Opera Class

I'm listening to as many things as I can muster up from my CD collection, in the wake of the life-changing Opera class, but I'm finding that symphonies alone don't do it for me. What's great about opera is that is has a story. And the stories are raw with elemental and universal human emotion, because, as our teacher said, the story has to be about things that would move a person to sing. Love, death, sex, tragedy, betrayal. Magnificent! My favorite experience in the class was listening to an aria with the libretto up on the overhead projector in both the original language and in English. The story! Once I can invest in some box sets that come with all this text, I will sit in front of the stereo and study and recreate the experience. Opera is gripping because of the story.

Life Writing vs Philorum

Remember when I went to that one-hour sample class on writing memoirs in November? It was such a change from Philorum, where all the conversation is about lofty abstract things, and where no one ever divulges biographical details. The class was all about biographical details, and about how to capture them and process them and get them down in words so that they speak to other people, and reveal things about universal human emotions. We learned in that one small class that you can only evoke emotions with vivid, factual detail, not with descriptions of emotions. You have to tell the story specifically, with detail, as it was, as it seemed to you at the time, without commentary or abstraction or pontification or drawing conclusions. Specific stories from human lives speak to other humans and convey universal emotions and bind us all together.

Art Express

One of my favorite pieces in Art Express this year, the show of HSC graduates' final projects, was a set of little cute wire sculptures. They were like 3D cartoons. At first I thought they were just of little people, little anonymous characters, doing things. Two figures were in a very detailed camping caravan, playing cards (the little wire heart in a little wire square sat perfectly in the cute wire person's hand). The next piece was a round circus tent with a ringmaster and several dogs, and a figure just entering from behind a curtain hanging open at the back. Then I read the description, and all the people were Australian politicians, which you could then recognise when you looked, and the scenarios were all metaphors for struggles they were facing with political opponents. And knowing that made me like the piece much less. It was still very accomplished, and clever, and different from the others (about 9 out of 10 students had done pieces were images were in a series of squares - which was also a very big motif of the Biennale earlier this year - and how stupid would you feel if you had chosen squares as your theme? Already such a cliché. I love a good square as much as any former Modernist, but they're just done to death at the moment! Poor high school kiddies.), but it would have been so much better, as art you know, if they hadn't been Australian political figures, if the little sculptures hadn't been just 3D political cartoons, but if they had been just little tableaux of little specific humans representing scenes that evoke universal emotions.


I don't know what this new movement will be called. You never do, when you're in it and it's only just emerging. But in all these fields - painting, ballet, music - the abstract approach, Modernism's elementalism and stripping away to bare essentials of art's structure, the approach has reached the end of the road. There's nowhere else for it to go, no more basic it can get. So, we need something different. And so I predict, once again, our art will be like Shakespeare, our art will tell human stories and explore human emotions and universal characteristics of what it is to be human, and it will bind us all together once again.

You heard it here first.