Monthly Archive for January, 2002

One sentence for a spark…
I just need one sentence. I’ve felt that writing energy these past few days, that inexpressible feeling of being alive directly at the fingertips. I feel it. It’s coursing through me like anything else necessary for existence. I feel it. Something great could be written sometime soon: All I need is one sentence. If I had a truly perfect first sentence, something great would get written. I feel it. Anyone who’s written anything will tell you the same thing. It’s a mood, it’s an energy, it’s a mindset. It’s uncontrollable, unpredictable, inconsistent. You can just feel it and know it. I just need one sentence. Any thoughts? No, it can’t come from someone else. It has to be complete, whole, and the original product has to be entirely of me. I just wish it would happen, because I don’t know how much longer this will last or when it will come back. I wonder: did Isaac Asimov feel like this everyday? Amazing guy, Asimov, with an amazing mind, but what did he feel like when he wrote? I know he did it basically every day of his life for maybe seventy-some-odd years. What kind of energy must he have had?

I went with Leo and Cassie the other night to take Mel to the airport. Mel’s going to visit her family in Malaysia, then her friends in Singapore. She used to live in both places, and her parents still have an apartment in Concord, one of the innumerable suburbs of Sydney. She’ll be gone for two weeks. It’s odd, but I miss her already. I missed her the morning after. Mel’s cool. She’s one of my best friends down here.

“Aussie ! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!”—John Howard.

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds…

Mel
One of the first things you notice about Mel is her smile. It’s this broad, genuine expression that is given to the world on a very consistent basis. There’s a chain reaction: Mel’s face lights up when she smiles or when she laughs, and she, in turn, lights up the room as a result. It doesn’t matter why, or whether or not you were listening to her, because she’s a conduit of positive energy and everybody feeds off it. Looking at her, it does occur odd that such energy would be present in such a small person. She’s short, she’s slim, and she’s almost perfectly proportioned. She walks funny, as if each step were just a tiny thrilling surprise. Her dark hair, now died slightly red, is almost always pulled straight back. Her skin is of a light, even olive color, and her eyes match her natural hair color. Her eyes are almost as expressive as her smile. She calls them Asian eyes, but I don’t really know what to call them. They say eyes are a window to the soul, and Mel’s eyes are like two bay windows. They’re open and accepting in the same way that her personality is. They can do so much, say so much, that they add an extra layer to this bland language, English, that she speaks in a confused Australian/American accent. She’s an Australian citizen, and has lived here for now almost four years, but spent significant amounts of time in Louisiana, so her accent is a mishmash of Southern-Belle American pronunciation of Aussie vernacular. In an odd juxtaposition of localities, she calls Australia home, her family lives in Malaysia, she speaks largely like an American who hasn’t lived here long enough, her Mom is a native of Singapore, and her dad is a stodgy-Englishman looking Aussie. The resulting mix is what people long ago called an “exotic” beauty, but to me at the dawn of the 3rd Millennium, she just looks stunning in a way I’m not used to. It’s a blessing that she’s got a warm personality to match. This is a long way of indicating why she’s been gone not even two days and I miss her already. She’s greatly benefited my time here in Sydney, and two weeks is going to be quite a while without her.

Australia Day
Today is Australia Day. It’s like the 4th of July, but less emotional. You get the feeling that people really like it here, but not enough to get excited about it. It’s just Australia, no big deal. Today I saw more Australian flags than I ever had before, and these much ridiculed cartoon characters supposed to remind Australians of their unique environment. The effect was less than stellar. The Australians looked a little embarrassed, as if they didn’t want the culminating cultural symbol of life down under to be the Wombat.

Cassie and I took the bus downtown, got off near Town Hall. We went first to the Australian Museum which is right across from Hyde Park. The Australian Museum, Cassie thinks, is modeled after the Museum of Natural History in NYC. It had tons of interesting exhibits, from a tour of Aboriginal (or Indigenous, as they said in the exhibit, so as to not offend one group or another, I believe) Culture, which was extremely interesting, to an exhibition on Biodiversity. I love museums in general, and this was polished and fun. They also had this amazing collection of nature photographs. God that sounds fruity to say, but, trust me, it was quite amazing. Things were done with cameras that we, as 21st Century humans would think only possibly with large amounts of computer editing.

After the museum, Cassie and I went through Hyde Park where there were Australia Day festivities happening. There were antique cars, including someone’s Cadillac Pride and Joy, in front of which I had my picture taken. There was multi-cultural food and drink. There was a stage for kids with annoying performers who didn’t even have the decency to sing “Do your ears hang low?” There was a main stage with a nameless, hopeless rock band. There was a jazz stage just off Hyde Park where even the performers looked bored. This all sounds rather cynical, but it was a nice experience. Hyde Park is beautiful, with its overarching gum trees that filter and disperse the light, its many accessible and dramatic water fountains, and, today, its special provision for public alcohol consumption. All these factors conspired to make it an interesting and beautiful afternoon.

After Hyde Park, Cassie and I walked around the City Centre (yes, they spell it weird like the French. I’ve already been yelled at for spelling it Darling Harbor, instead of Harbour, for saying the light had a nice color, when in fact down here it has nice colour. It’s all faux-sophistication, if you ask me. It’s also rather odd that the Aussies, who drop whole syllables and sounds off of words would get in a funk over me taking away one pointless letter) and then down to Circular Quay. We got something to drink at this nice place called Quay Grand and just generally soaked up the sun and the harbor and the floating masses below us.

This was quite an excursion, and a great day to see Sydney in its finest. We went home after Quay Grand and got Oporto’s (the stuff is too addictive, I really need to cut down). Then Cassie went to bed and I watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with Paul and Jenny. I had forgotten most of what happened in that movie, as well as how good it is.

Now, as it’s getting a bit late and I always feel like writing when it’s too late to do anything else, I’m writing down the day’s excursion, because I really would not want to forget it.

Sound and Consciousness

One of the things recommended for meditation is to rely on senses other than sight in order to concentrate and calm. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. The sound here in my room is so vivid and the acoustics so amazing that I can hear lowly spoken conversations at the bus stop on the other side of the building across the street. I can hear the twist of a shoe on the pavement outside, the belch of the wino that sleeps on a park bench up the street, sirens that start close and end up far, far away, screeching wheels of miraculously torque-laden ghetto rollers racing through the night, bits of phone conversations at the pay phone half a block up. It’s amazing. It keeps me up at night. It’s audio-overload. I’ve had to leave my laptop on with music, usually Radiohead or Jay-Z, oddly enough, in order to sleep. I’m not exactly a big sleeper even when I’m in my insulated, close-windowed-room at home, but this is a whole other level. Amazing the effect concentration can have, though. If you just sit there, feel the breeze through the shade, close your eyes, concentrate on breathing and letting the sounds of the world wash over you, your heart rate goes down, the restless nature of my mind, at least, is momentarily calmed. So it’s no bull. It really does work. It’s easy to pawn off the work and beliefs of mystics as “mumbo-jumbo,” and feel a need for cathedrals, holy wars, etc. but the experience of this has lent another level of legitimacy to my belief in mysticism. I think I’ll stop one step short of the mushrooms and Timothy Leary posters, but higher-consciousness is possible. Very possible. What a thought! There’s hope for me after all.

B.

The last two days have been rather fun-filled. On Saturday, Tomy and I went to Darling Harbour to meet Leo, who was tending bar at the IMAX Theater there. He just works for IMAX, and, by his own admission, has no clue how to tend bar.

Sidenote: Mom, just because Leo was tending bar and Tomy ordered a tequila sunrise, it does not necessarily imply that I was drinking as well. Making radical assumptions of this sort is risky at best, and inadvisable always. That said, it was noon somewhere, right?

We were going to see an IMAX movie, but both Tomy and Leo were more interested in food from Taiwan than adventures in Antarctica of any kind.

Darling Harbour is as close as I have seen yet to something like the great fabled American Mall?. It’s an open air construction with a beautiful park, water art, an elaborate metal and water jungle gym construction that instantaneously makes everyone in the vicinity jealous of those under 10 years old, an IMAX theater, a regular movie theater, a Starbucks, a McDonalds, a place called “Australian’s Northern Territory and Outback Centre,” a big convention center, plus the harbour itself where they have stunt shows every day. It’s quite a place. I felt right at home. We had a good time. It’s also right near China town, so Leo and Tomy had immediate access to apparently good Taiwanese food. I felt a bit ostracized for not having it, but any guilt I might have had about not completely soaking up the local culture evaporated like anything resembling my appetite when the pigs ears were brought out. “No thanks, fellas.”

We came back to the dorm, where I read for a few hours (Dubliners continues to impress, and our primary sources for history are deeply interesting, if numerous). Then Mel, Paul and I went to see Rat Race. Mel was meeting us there after work, so Paul and I had to get there on our own. The first and obvious place to look for transportation was the bus stop, which is just up the street. Paul and I waited awhile, and, as Paul is now very quick to point out, we could have walked all the way down to the theatre given as much time as we had, so waiting it out for a bus wouldn’t have been such a horrible thing. Then came Corinne. Corrine was a beautiful Aussie blond, a general sciences major at U Sydney (which everyone here calls Sydney Uni; The University of Melbourne is known as Melbourne Uni, and so on?). She had just come from a nice Thai resteraunt (more on that later), and was on her way to work at The Establishment, a yuppy lawyer/stock broker bar downtown. From her description, I almost thought she was talking about the Capital Grille (I don’t care if no one gets the reference, because Dad does, and that’s all that matters). Anyway, she, also had plenty of time to get to work, but she was “rather cold.” Well, one thing led to another and Paul and I got conned into taking a cab for the short distance to the movie theater. Paul blames the whole thing on me, and maybe that’s deserved, but you never know. It was relatively cheap, thankfully, but entirely unnecessary. Not only that, but we were even earlier for Mel than we thought we were going to be, so we bade the fair Corinne farewell and went to McDonalds. We had an interesting discussion of Australian/American politics/economics and then went to the movies.

I had already seen Rat Race, but it was still extremely amusing. Definitely comes recommended, just maybe not for kids. Ah hell, censorship is annoying. Let the kids see it. It’s not like protecting them from everything resembling real life will have a positive effect on them either. Just as long as a distinction is made in two places: 1) The boundary between real life and fiction/fantasy, and 2) The distinction between what is made to look good on screen and what is undeniably bad. As long as those two are taken care of, I think anybody should be capable of seeing just about any movie at any age. This, of course, requires a great deal of faith on the part of the parent towards the child, but, if the kid is even decently intelligent, go for it. Let it be a bonding experience. You’ll both grow.

Anyway, the movie, again, didn’t disappoint. We took the bus home where I snapped the funny looking candid shot you can see on the Yahoo! Photos gallery. Once arrived, I really can’t remember exactly what we did, but it was relatively boring and I came downstairs and went to sleep.

I woke up this morning, did NOT go to the beach as fatigue and looming assignments got the better of me. I wrote some (tons) of emails, uploaded some pictures, then actually got some work done so it wasn’t a completely wasted day. I admit, I was still thinking about how perhaps, in this cosmopolitan city, I should take greater advantage of the wildly varied cultural cuisine. My experimental side killed my reserved American side, and I decided I wanted something cultural for dinner. I suggested Thai, Tomy, who holds his embrace of many cultures over my head, suggested Turkish as an alternative. We followed his suggestion and went and got Turkish Pizza. It looks a lot like a sliced calzone, but it was excellent. Garlic bread was good, too. I’m sure the Italians in the reading audience will be quick to fire off emails saying how this isn’t really a new culture that I’m embracing, because the Turks stole everything from Italy, but throw me a bone here. It’s the first non-American-owned establishment I’ve been to and really, really liked since I’ve been here.

When we came back, I read the paper a bit then went down to the barbecue that the guys from Unit 12 were throwing (Unit 12 consists of Dave, Ron, Paul, Peter Chan (who’s never there because he’s always here with Leo), and Colin). I’m always upset when I come out to a barbecue down here and no one says “Hey, it’s Brian, throw another shrimp on the barbie?” I guess that’s a bit much to ask. To be fair, none of them had ever heard of throwing shrimp on a Barbie till someone (probably an American, they noted) came up with that phrase. Ah well, yet another Australian cultural myth down the tubes. Yea, you can’t find kangaroos here for fifty miles, either. I really expected them to be like stray dogs in the street, or something. Really, really fast dogs?

Anyway, after the barbecue I was convinced to go see yet another movie that I’d already seen (but which was just released here-I feel so cool): Ocean’s Eleven. Good flick. On the way home, we took some pictures that didn’t come out so great. I still may post some of them, just out of interests sake, but they may require some editing. I had an excellent discussion of many things with Cassie, from the 1st Floor (which is not the ground floor, by the way), and had fun helping her navigate her way home. Because she had a really crappy monitor placed at a horrible angle at the job she worked for 9 months or so, Cassie now can barely see out of her right eye. She put in drops just before we left, so that eye was almost completely dilated: thus, her navigation skills were a bit off. Mostly fine, but a bit off. I feel really bad for her, as it’s gotten worse even since I’ve been here. Not a great situation.

Now, as I lay me down to sleep, the stars are awe-inspiring. These Sydney-siders have no idea how lucky they are to be able to see stars at night. No other major city in the world permits that. The glow of countless, pointless streetlights hides the things that most connect us to heaven. I’m definitely a modern guy, I believe in the ability of technology to make our lives better, I believe in the whole idea, I really do, but I also think that we may have irreversibly lost something:

• There are no wild places anymore, there are no more true explorers. The only places we don’t know about, we send satellites to do our grunt work. I don’t know about you, but I need a frontier. I need a great new project that humanity can rally around and go for. I feel a need to push the boundaries of our domain.
• Darkness is the
  enemy in the modern world. Darkness invokes fear, because we don’t know what might be in the darkness, and fear of the unknown drives more human actions than we’d otherwise care to admit.
• How much of our time is spent traveling or doing travel related things? One of the things I can’t get over in Dubliners is how much time the characters spend walking. Was this so before the rise of the metropolis? Did people in rural villages walk ALL the time? And in the modern, car-ridden world (don’t you love my use of the word “ridden” there?), how much time do we spend on the bloody highway? How much time do we spend looking for parking spots? Listening to the radio? Do you really know how much damage your SUV is doing to the planet?
• Anybody will tell you: church attendance is down. I won’t necessarily equate that as a horrible thing, but it says something, surely. I have to question the motive, though: how many people don’t go to church because they’re too wound up in the cultural great idea that we should work jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don’t need to impress girls that would otherwise not want us that we will eventually lament over in a pub till the early hours of the morning which forces us to sleep in on Sunday, rather than go to church? When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” maybe he just meant that in this age we wouldn’t quite have time for him?

I know I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit here: I know that more streetlight helps with crime rates, makes leery women less scared to walk alone; I know that cars have numerous advantages that have added to the coolness of the modern experience, and God knows I love my Focus back home, but one of my main reasons for wanting a year off (even before I knew I could) was to figure things out, try to make rational decisions on where I thought things were going and then where I thought they should go. This applies directly to everything from my personal spirituality to my political beliefs to global trends. 2002 may be the year of the Outback here in Australia, but in McGuirkland, it’s the year of the great reevaluation, the great breath of fresh air before the long road ahead. I won’t be able to stay on that road if I don’t. Besides, anything that challenges your reality has to be, in the end, a good thing, right?

Brian

Well, yesterday was quite eventful. We had made plans this whole weekend to go to the beach on Sunday. The plan was to leave at 11, which we almost made (Leo woke up at 11 or so, and was ready quickly, so I guess that counts). The “we” in this story consists of Leo, Tomy, and myself, by the way. We took a bus from here to Circular Quay, where we caught a ferry to Manly.

There are actually two varieties of ferry that you can catch: the Jet-Cat, which is a catamaran jet boat that takes about half the time of the second variety: the Sydney Harbour Ferry. We were literally thirty seconds late for the Jet Cat, for which we had just bought tickets. It was like something out of a chick-flick: someone running at top speed, dropping probably important pieces of paper on the ground behind him, jumping through gates, hurdling small children, careening through a maze of metal fences to arrive, with melodramatically perfect timing, at the edge of the dock with the boat just five or ten feet away, people waving from its upper decks. If only it were Meg Ryan on that boat, and I had just received word, through e-mail or a call-in radio program that she was my match, my soul-mate, the one person in the world who would truly and for all time make me happy? luckily it was mostly Japanese tourists, who, oddly, took our picture as we nearly slipped and fell in the harbour. Actually, if you want the gods-honest truth, none of this actually happened, it was just a short exercise in creative writing. We bought tickets for the jet-cat but missed our opportunity to get on it by, literally (I wasn’t kidding), seconds. The electronic gate system locks you out after it has let its last passenger through, and the last passenger through was a guy just in front of us. You liked the Meg Ryan bit, though, didn’t you?

Anyway, we caught the much slower but certainly functional Sydney Harbour Ferry about five minutes later. Tomy, ever the miser, was actually happier because it cost A$1.00 less (keep in mind that that’s about 50 cents in America). We got off at Manly. Manly apparently gets its name from a European description of the aborigines that lived there: Manly fellows. So it stuck. If I ever find a good map of Sydney and all its myriad harbors and inlets and rivers and beaches and islands, I’ll certainly post a link to it here, but for now, just trust me on where I went and how I got there.

Manly looks a lot like Miami, Florida. There are palm trees down every street, art-deco hotels and shops on every corner and main thoroughfare. It’s also laughably gawdy. I hear Bondi is even worse in this regard, but the mix of people, so balanced and pretty in Sydney itself, is laughable at Manly. The prevalence of yuppified Australians, rich, Porsche driving beach bums, and overweight Asian and American tourists collaborates to provide a picture that is somewhere south of the great melting pot image. The only Miami stereotype missing were Latinos and gay people.

Sidenote: America owns everything. I came 100052 miles, by my estimation, and the first establishment I saw was an American Hotel chain: Holiday Inn. Walking through Manly, I saw: McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and some other places that skip my mind. Even things I thought were actually Australian, like Hungry Jack’s, a burger-and-fries fast-food type place, are actually just fronts for American companies (Burger King in this case). This is mind blowing. I mean, we always hear about the dominance of America around the globe, but it never quite hit home till I got here. Australia seems to like the US a lot, but like, apparently, tons of other people around the world, they are wary of its influence and power. I guess I can understand that. I mean, Americans themselves are scared of how much power the government has, how much Microsoft knows about them. It’s a perfectly rational and normal fear to have, I guess.

We continued through Manly and to the other side of what I guess is a small peninsula to Manly Beach. Now, understand here that one of my major goals for coming to Australia was to learn how to surf. One of the reasons I had no objections to coming to Manly was that I had read that they had surfing lessons there. I’ve always sort of had a thing for surfing, and what better way to flaunt my geographic and climatic superiority over my friends in the American Northeast, who are probably just now digging in, preparing for a snow storm, than to go surfing? This is a great mental refuge for learning how to surf, by the way. Every time I fell, every time I got hit in the head by some passing surfboard, instead of getting angry, I thought: Hey, at least I’m not shoveling.

So we went to the other end of the beach and waited for the surfer dudes to open up. Leo and I went swimming in the meantime, and Tomy? well, sat. I have no idea why Tomy came and did not swim, did not object to Leo and I taking surfing lessons, and I have no idea what the hell he did for 2 hours while we were taking them. He seemed happy though. He probably went and listened to Jennifer Lopez for a few hours or something. She’s big in Indonesia, apparently. I doubt Jennifer Lopez could find Indonesia on a map. Oh wait, Indonesia has four syllables, so she wouldn’t understand the question anyway. Ouch, that was mean, wasn’t it?
Leo and I did not have reservations, as we were going by the general theory that with the skies overcast as they had been all day, the “possible showers” in the forecast as it had been, that people wouldn’t be nearly as likely to sign up for lessons. Yes, I know, that would have stopped most people from going to the beach in general, but realize that it had been five months since I’d seen the beach, and Leo is from Canberra (pronounced Can-bra, I’ve learned) which is over three hours from, well, anything interesting at all, including the beach, so we were going to go, regardless.

The diesel head-surfer-dude told us that if we waited, it was very possible that people wouldn’t show, and we could jump in their spots. That happened to be the way it worked out. I also met this girl, I think her name was Karen or something, who was from Boston. She lived in Cambridge, and not only did she know where Providence was, but her ex-boyfriend lived in Little Compton (and was thus loaded). She loved Providence and was thinking of moving there.
The surfing lessons themselves were quite cool. I’m really starting to get the hang of it. Retaining balance is a bit of an issue, but I signed up for three lessons, so I should at least be proficient by the time I finish. There was one interesting anecdote that you may be interested to hear: One of Bill Bryson’s favorite things is to talk about the large number and wide variety of things that can kill you or cause you serious pain in Australia. I met one of them yesterday. I know you’re all thinking the same thing: shark. Sadly yesterday was not THAT eventful, but what a story that would be, eh? The instrument of pain that I grew intimate with was this cute little thing called a Blue Bottle. To quote Bill Bryson: “It looked unprepossessing, like a blue condom with strings attached.” It’s a lot like a jellyfish, but, as I found out from the extremely knowledgeable and resourceful Jenn Pirri: ”?blue bottles don’t inject stinging cells like other jelly fish. They sting sort of like bees, injecting a toxin into the skin.” There. I bet you didn’t know that. Regardless of the form of the toxin, a whole lot of it got on my wrist and ankle, where the thin, strong, bead-like tentacles of this little bastard got wrapped around a few times.

It hurt a significant amount more than a bee sting, indeed was a little startling at the time, but as Jenn also says: “Look out for box jellyfish… I hear they are worse than blue bottles.” Again, to quote from Bill Bryson:

“It was the height of the season for Box Jellyfish, also known in Queensland as marine stingers, or just stingers. By whatever name they go, these little bubbles of woe are not to be trifled with. From October to May, when the jellyfish come inshore to breed, they render the beaches of the tropics useless to humans. It is quite an extraordinary thought when you are standing there looking at it. Before us stood a sweep of bay as serene and inviting as you would find anywhere, and yet there was no environment on earth more likely to offer instant death.”

God, I love Australia. Check this site for some more fun facts on the Stinger. Apparently the Stinger can even show you God! What a creature!
I went back to surfing after five minutes under a fresh-water shower. I felt the bastard for the rest of the day, however, and today, more than 29 hours after the fact, my hand is still swollen. It packs quite a punch for something so small.
The rest of the day was relatively uneventful. I came back and immediately delved into Dubliners, by James Joyce. It’s an excellent book, but I can’t help feeling like I’m missing something. The sketches are excellent, and give you a great portrait of the subjects in question. It’s actually exactly the sort of thing I want to write. Is that disrespectful to a literary master, to take his idea and adopt it for a new city? What would I call it? Providencians? People of Providence? Providence? Is it egoism to think that I could? I guess we’ll see. Definitely thought-provoking, though, Dubliners. Beautiful.

I also may have found someone to come with me to the Gold Coast when Summer School is out, but it’s just in the discussion phase right now. Again, it all boils down to economics: If I can find cheap enough tickets, everything will fall into place.

Today was a really lazy day. I sat around, read Dubliners, bought shampoo and coca-cola as well as batteries for my digital camera. Definitely just vegged.

Much love.
B.

PS – You might think that writing this much is a waste of my time, that I should be out experiencing new things, not reanalyzing, rehashing old ones. I thought about that, but I think if I don’t think through the things I’ve done, try and gleam from them as much enlightenment as I can, then the experiences themselves don’t matter for crap. If I don’t do that, then there’s no real difference between me being here and me watching a travel video about the same subjects. Just to put that thought out of your mind?

Well the past few days have been pretty crazy. Wednesday, the day after New Years Day, started early (7AM). I cleaned up my hotel room, but I had packed most of my stuff the night before. I checked out, got a taxi and started downtown. It only took about 10-15 minutes to get here, and I’m almost positive we went the longest way around that’s physically possible, but I got here. The taxi dropped me off on Darlington Road. It looked like a small street, so I figured that I would eventually run into Darlington House. Not as such. It’s actually on a corner, and the one sign that designates it as anything other than yet another apartment house is a tiny sign on the inside of the doorway. I didn’t see that sign the first time by, so I walked, suitcases, etc in hand down to the Aquatic Complex (also on Darlington Road). With typical aussie wit, the guy behind the counter said “Checkin’ in, mate? Room 25, down the hall.” He then, with typical aussie compassion, directed me to where I should be. Map of U Syd Campus

Well, having arrived at Darlington House, and finding the welcoming committee, ticker tape, high school marching band, etc. all missing, the door locked, and no one responding to knocked windows, I did what any other intelligent American would do: I sat, read the Sydney Morning Herald, and waited. Eventually, my future roommate Tomy came by and let me in.

Tomy is from Bandung, Indonesia. He feels as apart from his family and friends as I do, but he doesn’t love them enough to put up a website. : Tomy’s english is not the greatest, but, I guess, neither is mine. We communicate passably and both speak better than most Australians.

After Tomy let me in, I thought all my troubles were over, that I would meet the house manager who would be just inside in the lobby, or at the very least some senior with a clue, but, sadly, both were gone for the summer. There was at least a pay phone inside the lobby, so I could call around and figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing. I called the property office of U Sydney, to a woman named Moira Keane. To describe Ms. Keane properly would mean that I would come off looking mean and unkind, and probably set me up for a libel suit of some kind, so I will just describe Ms. Keane as tragically overworked. She wanted me to walk to the geographical other corner of the U Sydney campus with my bags to pick up my keys, make my first deposits, etc. Maybe later I’ll post a picture of my fully loaded bags, but lets just assume that this was not really an option if I wanted to retain full use of my arms and back for the foreseeable future. Luckily, I saw on the map that the Summer School building (called Gatekeepers Lodge) was very close (1 block) from Darlington House. I went there, and with the assistance of the extremely funny and nice Lois Bennett, got my internet login information, my confirmation of enrolment, etc. as well as a place to put my bags for the rest of the morning. So I walked over to the other side of campus with just my wallet and enrolment information.

I think somewhere in Ms. Keane’s heart she wanted to see me trudge up the two flights of stairs in the Telfer building to her office with my massive suitcase, backpacks, etc. She really did look a bit disappointed when I arrived.

After reading through copious legal documents, for which I was criticized for actually reading, I might add, I dotted all the i’s, got my keys, and got the hell out of there. I walked back to the Summer School office, got my bags, went to Darlington, went to my room, said hi to Tomy again, put my bags down, then went off to my first class.

Quite a morning.

American History, as taught by an ex-pat New Zealander, is quite an experience. It’s at times scathing (thought mostly deservedly), and at times inspiring. It reinforces my own singular unchanging belief about the US: despite our many, visible faults, our greatest strength is our ability to change. Once we recognize the right thing to do, we turn, however great an effort it may require, in that direction. It may take time, it may take pain and sacrifice, but we do it. We have righted so many of the wrongs we’ve committed in our history, and really come so far in every possible cultural sense, that it’s impossible not to be more than just a little proud. Anyway, this class starts just after the Civil War and will go into the Clinton Era. I’m rather excited.

My next two days passed much the same way. They were all busy mornings, followed by evening spent studying and walking around our immediate area here in Sydney. I’m planning something more like a daytrip for this weekend.

Bushfires
It smells like smoke all the time, here. We can’t see any of the fires, even from the roof (trust me, we looked), but there is the all-pervasive smell of smoke and ash. Also, depending on the winds that day, even the downtown skyline, which is no more than 4 miles or so away, can be obscured. From all accounts, though, the firefighters are doing an amazing job with it. No one has yet died, and only a few houses have been lost. So no, I haven’t yet had to go out in the street with a garden hose or anything, but the fires are certainly being felt around.

Much love, guys. Keep safe.

Brian

Sittin’ on my own

Chewin on a bone

A thousand million

Miles from home…

But I wanna talk tonight

Until the morning light

‘Bout how you saved my life

And you and me see how we are

And you and me see how we are…