Hunk

I got a text message on the 21st, from a number I didn't recognise (or rather, one that my phone match up to my list). It said "MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU SEXY HUNK". This is a good thing, of course. I immediately texted back to ask who it was, they responded "Mmmmmm".

The next day I was still wondering, so I went back with "I still don't know who you are, except that you think I'm a sexy hunk. Which doesn't narrow it down, of course."

Then on xmas day, "Merry Christmas". I still have no idea.

Stop what?

I was driving around Melbourne this morning and saw a car that was festooned with stickers, including one that said "STOP BAD DEVELOPMENT". This is almost completely meaningless. Of course if something's bad it should be stopped, that's the easy bit.

Nuisance

My sons should really take notice of this sign. And also, people who dither in airports.

New T-shirt

In case you can't read it, it says "I judge you when you use poor grammar." And you know that's so true.

Pelligrini's

I'm staying in central Melbourne, and working in our office there, and this morning on the way to work I passed by Pellegrinis and figured, what the heck, I'd have a coffee. It was quite fuss-free, I went in, sat on a stool, ordered a coffee, was served, drank it, paid for it and left. Pretty straightforward. So what's the big deal?

As a young man I always found Pelligrinis a bit intimidating, I always got the sense that if you didn't order the right thing in the right way you'd regret it. The regulars seemed so at ease, the staff gruffly friendly with them, that the frosty reception they gave me on the one or two times I went there seemed like a deliberate slight. It was as though they were saying we don't want your type in here, mate. When I was first going out with my ex (my wife, the mother of my children etc) one of the many things about her that impressed me was that she'd mastered Pelligrini's - she was on nodding terms with the staff, they treated her with courtesy and professional respect. I loved that! She couldn't understand why I was so hesitant about the place, she'd never had any problems there, and of course I was left thinking its just me.. they take one look at me and they hate me .

Flush with this morning's success, and feeling quite chipper, I went there for a coffee after lunch. I found a seat at the bar, got out my book (finishing that Tim Winton - see previous post about bad hair and good writing). I caught the eye of the guy who works the back of the place, the guy with the cravat and the loud voice. I raised my hand, said "a latte please" and was a little disturbed by his lack of reaction.

Did I or did I not order a coffee? My old Pellegrinis insecurity came back. Was this part of the working of the place, they took your order with no fuss, in which case would catching his attention again and ordering a second time be an implicit insult? Or had he just not heard me, in which case in a few minutes they'd be wondering why I was sitting there like a fool not ordering something? My life's complicated enough without having to think all this through. I read my book, a man saves his brother from a shark, but it's caught up in an intense sibling rivalry - the younger man was a football star who'd turned his back on the game, the older man a wife-beater.

I realised that I wasn't going to get coffee. Could I just slink out, or would that just cause more problems? What if they were, in fact, making it, and so slinking out would end up in them chasing me with a cleaver? Pelli's is (or was) full of journalists so I'd be sure of ending up on the front of The Age and the Hun the next day.

He said very exapnsively to us all "does anyone need to order", so I bravely half-raised my hand and said "I'm waiting on a latte". I swear there was an intake of breath, a half-suppressed sigh. Then he said to the sad-looking guy at he front "gentleman here is waiting on a latte", in a way that suggested it was both very bold and very cowardly of me to be just sitting there waiting for one without doing much about it. A latte arrived almost immediately (suspiciously quickly, I thought even as he put it down in front of me) and it was ghastly. Too strong, watery, acrid. As I drank it I couldn't help wondering if it was a special one they keep aside for troublemakers.

I'm probably reading too much into this, but Melbourne does this to me.

As an aside, check out this menu. It's a place that's run by an acquaintance of mine, a place that's almost impossible to find. Especially the bit towards the end, the things they won't do.

Pants

I've been noticing a strange smell today, a sort of chemical whiff mixed up with something rotting, and I've been hoping it's not me. It's been following me around and i finally figured out what it is. It's my trousers! On Monday I took them into a shop to be cleaned and pressed (I do my own shirts, but I draw the line at pants) and they appear to have done them in rancid camel's urine, with a bit of acetone thrown in to give it a top note.

Xmas

I survived christmas, and for the first time in about 20 years managed not to overeat, and as an added bonus didn't have a drink either. The not drinking was mostly a result of having a strong but not incapacitating hangover after being out for a few drinks with a friend the night before, christmas eve. I do know that by the end of the night I was incoherent, but we were in pretty good shape because he gets more excited and chatty as he drinks, so as I'm losing the ability to speak he's talking more so we make do. It did remind me that if I ever want to to try chatting up women in a bar I need to stay pretty sober. And I did experience 'beer panic' again, first time since being at the MCG with A to watch the football, but part of the panic then was that we were passing ourselves off as friends.

Christmas morning I got up at 0530 (!!??!!) and arrived at my ex's house at 0600. The boys were awake, then, shortly thereafter, the girls. We did all the presents, I made breakfast, then I left at about 0900. My sister was having a christmas lunch, as she does every year, and I was invited. She asked me a few weeks ago and I said I couldn't come because I was busy. When she asked me what I was going to be busy doing, I replied flatly "I'm not sure yet". I did drop by for a few minutes about midday, then went back to my hotel room and had a nap for a few hours, then laid in bed for a couple of hours reading. Why have I not done this for so long? It was such a treat - especially on a day when everyone else is running around like mad.

Signs

Back to one of my recurring themes: funny signs. And before you roll your eyes like that, it could be worse. At least I'm not doing one of my 'kids say the darnest things' posts.

I'm staying in a cheap hotel in Melbourne (I'm paying for it myself; if it were my employer paying it'd be a bit more grand.) Directly opposite is a bar called "Mrs Parma's". It took me about a day (!!??!!) to work that one out. It proudly says it's an 'ALL-VICTORIAN BEER BAR", so there's none of that nasty interstate beer there.

When I was a lad every December the men who drove the trucks for the beer company would go on strike. Bear in mind this was just after university holidays started, it was getting very hot and dry. Because of the way Melbourne is there's only one beer company, CUB (as it then was) and there was a vaguely soviet quality to the way you'd get beer here. I remember going to Sydney in the early 80s and having to learn how to order beers, you had to specify the size of the glass and the kind of beer ("old", "new", "resch's", others even worse). In a Melbourne pub you'd just say "a beer" and the guy would pour you a beer. Interestingly, most of those Sydney beers died out: it turns out Sydney people didn't like them either.

Anyway. During the beer drought, word would go around Melbourne that a truck had been sighted coming towards the city, a truck full of beer! It was like on Gilligan's Island when someone spotted a plane or a ship, but before Gilligan managed to mess everything up so that the plane or ship passed by without seeing the over-engineered rescue signs. We'd all head to St Kilda or Port Melbourne to the pub that was rumored to have sourced some beer from interstate. If it was XXXX we'd be happy, it was a pretty good substitute for real beer. Swan or West End were generally not tolerated until we were in the second week of the strike and we'd completely lost our pride. NSW beer was very suspect. Then, eventually the beer company would do a deal with the drivers and things would go back to normal, but not before a lot of musing about whether beer truck drivers should be put under the Essential Services Act, the one that starts the army from going on strike.

Another sign, yesterday on Kingsway. A big illuminated temporary sign saying "WESTGATE BRIDGE WORKS", and I for one am glad that it does.

Boring

Number two son, who incidentally everyone thinks is a mini-me, asked me today "Dad, was it really boring in the olden days?". Hard to answer really, you had to be there.

Stalked.... Again!

WaPo checked my blog again. I'm so excited, it almost makes up for being in Melbourne where it's been raining all *&^%king day and it's freezing.

More

Can I make another of my observations about Melbourne vs Sydney? I'm going to anyway. I think that fewer people in Melbourne have tattoos, but the ones who do tend to have more. So while in Sydney about half the population aged 20-40 has a tattoo it's usually just one or two (for men a tribal thing on the shoulder, for women a flower or a bird on the small of the back or the ankle). In Melbourne it's a lower proportion but they appear to have gone for the volume discount at the tattooist. And there are many more facial piercings here in Melbourne, which does make everyone look like they come from Geelong.

I'm being stalked! (But in a nice way)

I posted a thing yesterday on Emily Yoffe's story in Slate about her experience as a drag king. She used the name "Johnson Manly", by the way. Anyway, I was checking who'd been looking at this blog this morning and I got a hit from the Washington Post!!!! For those of you who are a bit challenged clue-wise, the WaPo is the parent of Slate. Hi Emily! (And John, and the other Emily too!)

Customer?

In today's SMH there's a column by Anne Summers in which she quite rightly gets annoyed with the use of the word 'customer' when it's not really the right word - airlines call us 'customers' instead of passengers, that sort of thing. She goes on: "But the most egregious example of this came when I contacted the Australian Electoral Commission, and a recorded message advised "customers" what to do.".

Why exactly is this so bad? She says because "I am a voter, an elector, a citizen but I am not a customer when it comes to exercising my democratic right." That's true, and it's bad enough. But it's worse! In Australia, voting isn't a choice. It's not a right; it's an obligation enforeable by law. Even on an airline a passenger is still a customer in the sense that he can choose to travel on a different carrier next time, or to not travel at all. We have no such latitude with the AEC. I know I've whinged about this before, bear with me.

(For the sake of clarity: this is most certainly not a whinge about Anne Summers.)


Compulsory Voting <--- what the AEC says. Some interesting court judgements too.

Nice sign

In an alleyway off Bourke St in Melbourne, up near Southern Cross Station, a sign that says sternly "COMMIT NO NUISANCE".

Kings

There was a semi-interesting article in Slate today (and if you don't read Slate, you should) about Emily Yoffe trying her luck as a drag king. A what? It's not that hard to figure out, so settle down. It's women who dress up as men - there was a really fascinating book about it, which is referenced in the Slate article.

Anyway, the article describes her going along to an organised group thing, with a leader, who "began the meeting by suggesting we all introduce ourselves by giving our names, astrological signs, and packing preferences". You can read about packing preferences, if you must, but what struck me was the idea that you introduce yourself by reference to astrological signs - especially in a setting where women were supposed to be learning how to behave like men.

Money

I was having dinner last week with Tim, a friend I've known for years here in Sydney. He's, among other things, an academic, and also has a private practice on the side. The university he works for had offered him a lump sum one-off payment to retire. He had more or less decided whether to take this offer, but wanted to run the whole thing by me. People have a naive faith in my ability to work magic with money and numbers (not surprising, I guess, given my background and my job), but once in a while I do get to show off, and I do enjoy the fun of bludgeoning a problem with some hard-nosed analysis.

After a bit of prompting, we figured out that his overall income would be much the same . He'd just be getting all his income from private practice. But he said he liked having two jobs instead of one, there was a benefit to him in diversification, and not really in any monetary sense. "So how much is it worth to you to have two jobs?", I asked him. He shifted a bit uneasily and said it was impossible to put a monetary value on it. My response, of course was to say that I can put a monetary value on anything. Next step was to divide the one-off payment by the rest of his working life to arrive at a figure per year. Let's call it X thousand dollars a year.

I looked at the beers we were drinking, and reminded him that he'd just entered into a transaction in which he'd expressed a preference. Given the choice between $4.25 and a bottle of beer, he'd chosen the bottle of beer. People sometimes forget this.

So I asked him to choose, in the same spirit, between X thousand dollars a year and this job diversity he likes. Which would he prefer? He unhesitatingly said the diversity. So that's the answer, the lump sum's not enough. I then said if we were really ambitious he could work out the amount of money per year where he's indifferent between the two and from that we could back out the lump sum that would be required, but we were getting bored with the topic by then.

That's a big one, mister,

I stopped by the fruit bandit this morning and got some blueberries and a banana. I don't know where he gets this stuff from, but the bananas he has are freakish things, straight and about a foot long. I wouldn't be surprised if they glow in the dark too. Fruit bandit and I have an uneasy but respectful relationship; I don't trust him and he knows it. I first encountered him when I moved back to Sydney two years ago, I'd gone to his stall and bought something like one apple, a peach and a banana. He often prices things as 3 for $2 and whatnot so you can never be sure how much things are if you buy items individually. I asked him how much it all was, he looked at me, saw I had a $5 note in my hand and said "five dollars". I handed it over, thinking what an agreeable coincidence it was that I had the exact amount of money, and it wasn't until I got back to work that I realised I'd been legged over.

So, back to our story. I was going up in the elevator this morning, a fairly crowded elevator. Only one person I knew, my colleague M. He said to me quite innocently "you've got a big banana". To my credit, I maintained my composure and just said "thank you" and then dissolved into silent hysteria.

It's so not.

I know most of the stuff on here is just me whingeing about how everything's gone to hell in a handcart, but I do have to say for the record that I couldn't imagine anything positive coming out of spending time with someone who calls Brisbane 'Brisvegas'. Brissie's not like Vegas in any interesting or fun way. And someone who uses that term just isn't thinking. I expect it's the sort of thing that would sound vaguely stylish and clever but only if you were a bit challenged, style and clever-wise.

I've been to Brissie twice. First time was for a couple of hours, the second time was for almost a whole day. And I did manage to find a decent coffee, despite what people say.

Pictures

I noticed today in the Wall Street Journal, in an article about cancer patients concocting their own mixtures of drugs, that in the sidebar they had photographs of the people. As opposed to those dotty pictures. Is this the beginning of the end? What's next, horoscopes? Page three girls?

Crystal

I had a friend give me a reiki session this morning. You've already guessed I'm so not into all that but I thought it'd be fun.

My favorite bit was when she stopped, went off and got a candle. As she was lighting it she explained "this is a beautiful candle; it has an actual crsytal inside it". The whole experience didn't do a great deal for me, but of course I loved the attention.

Spun

I went to the Saturday morning spin class and we had that Kiwi lass again, the one with the lovely thick accent (previous post, "bug strong ligs"). Today's highlight was when she said we all needed to wipe our bikes down after the class because they get a "but switty". She also said she was going back to NZ for xmas and that she was going to freshen up her accent, so I can't wait for January.

There's a point about five minutes into any spin class where a thought starts running around in my head, along the lines of I don't need to be doing this, it's undignified, why can't I just give in and become the fat man I really want to be etc. But I somehow hang on. There's always the temptation to really take it easy, noone really knows how hard you're working. Perhaps sensing my moral cowardice she said to us "you've chosen to come here this morning, you might as well do it properly", or words to that effect, and being the suggestible person that I am I thought "she's right!" and I knuckled down and did what I was told.

Drinks

There was a color piece in the Australian on the weekend about 'going out' in Australia, which of course meant Sydney because that's where all the journalists live.

I read it with some interest and something caught my eye. There were two young women, one in Hugo's who said “It’s not really a thing to pay for drinks...it’s different, being a girl”. And another who said "I don’t use money, I literally brought $10 with me tonight. If you’re good-looking, people will buy you anything.”

I didn't take much notice at the time, but something about this has been nagging at me all week, and I've been trying to work out what. Some idealogical unease? Reflected shame? Moral queasiness? Finally, today, I nailed it. It's something very old-fashioned: it's jealousy.

Taxi?

I was walking home from dinner, feeling very weary and slightly woozy (after 2 light beers - I'm a cheap date) when I decided to get a back and shoulder rub at one of the chinese massage places on Darlinghurst Road. I love a good massage, but even a bad massage is still pretty good. (I'll digress on this later.) And to clarify, I'm not talking about special massage with happy ending.

I'd been to this one before. Staightforward. You say what you want, you get some of your clothes off (depending on how shy you are - in my case not at all). On the wall is a sign with some emergency instructions, including this:

In case of dislocation treat by taxi

Now, to me this reads as though if they accidentally dislocate your shoulder or your hip, they should immediately call you a cab. Seems fair. What else could it mean, any ideas? Another one is to do with pregnancy, and I was reminded of being in an aerobics class many years ago. There were about ten woman, me, and another guy. The other guy was a bit of a rough diamond, mullet hairdo and all. At the start of the class the instructor - a woman - asked the usual questions: anyone new, anyone coming back from injury, then finally "is anyone pregnant?". At which this guy turned around and asked the group "would anyone like to be?" with a fairly cheeky smile. The women were adamantly unamused; I thought it was hilarious but (wisely) kept it to myself. It was all in the timing. You had to be there.

My digression. I remember a saying "sex is like pizza: even when it's bad it's still good". I used to think this was true, but then I went to Pizza Hut.

Door

I live in an apartment building on the edge of Elizabeth Bay. I'm on the border between the seedy bit and the fabulous bit (and yes, if you must, it's another crushingly obvious metaphor for my life. stop it.). The building was at some point a hotel, and part of still functions as serviced apartments so we get people who live here (like me) and people who are just passing through for a week or a month.

Sometimes when I come home, there's someone sitting on the step. Or someone's buzzing someone on the intercom and they try to slipstream in behind me as I go in. My reserves of politeness have worn away a long time ago and I just block them "do you live here?", I ask.

Sometimes the response is "I'm waiting for my friend, (s)he lives here". This is patently ridiculous, and if I'm in a good mood and feeling forceful and dynamic I'll point it out to them. "Your friend, who hasn't responded to your buzzing him, isn't around. What exactly are you going to do if I let you into the building? Wait in the stairwell?"

Apple and.... who?

There's rumors that Apple's teaming up with Telstra for the iPhone here in Australia. It's hard to imagine a more unlikely pairing and I've been trying for about three minutes (which is my entire attention span, for those who don't know me) to come up with an appropriate analogy.

I do notice that on the Kath and Kim fansite the link to the dictionary is down. They had a nice entry under Telstra.

Bender

I was on DJ 895 tonight, the 2045 MEL->SYD, and I have to say it's always with a great sense of relief that I get on the plane back up to Sydney. My kids are a real handful and the logistics of looking after them in Melbourne while being homeless are a bit, well, difficult.

As I sat down on 22C I noticed the young man next to me was wearing a baseball cap. My views on this aren't a secret, I don't think anyone should wear a hat on a plane, but instead of working myself up into a bender of contempt and silent fury I buried my head in the book I'd just started (literally - started while I was in line to get on the plane). It was a collection of short stories by Tim Winton, a writer I'd managed to avoid so far despite having had quite a few people recommend him. Now that I think about it, it's because of his hair. (Do I sound shallow enough..?)

The final straw was last weekend, I'd met a friend in a bookshop and she'd made me buy it. In revenge, I was going to make her buy Mr Philips but they didn't have it. (My favorite sentence: "And there is something about the limitless reserves of indifference she can express, the thrilling estuarine boredness of her 'Yeah'")

I take it all back. Tim Winton's great, even with that hair. It's impossible not to love a writer who can write "Now and then the hard laughter of ducks washed up the street..". I'm quite emotionally raw on plane trips - even short and uneventful ones - and some of the writing really got me. First paragraph of a story called "Small Mercies":

Peter Dyson came home early one day to find his wife dead in the garage. He'd only been gone an hour, kicking a ball in the park with their four-year-old son. The Ford's motor was still running, its doors locked, and even before he knew it for certain, before he put the sledge-hammer through the window, before the ambulance crew confirmed it, he was grateful to her for sparing the boy.

Ooooooohhhh! Nice.

Cold

One of the criticisms leveled at Hillary Clinton is that she's cold and calculating. Which might not be a great quality in a friend, but isn't that exactly what you'd want in a President? Especially after this current one, wouldn't it be good to have one who thinks things through?

Democracy

Pleasant evening. 2 diet cokes, 2 light beers, home by 915. The other day at work we were discussing ways to improve the democratic process, particularly ways to restrict voting eligibility. One of my colleagues thought that anyone who couldn't name two novels by Dostoevsky shouldn't be allowed to vote (I hesitated on that for a moment until I figured out I'd be able to pass).

As I was driving around outer suburban Melbourne this evening (I even went to Nunawading!) I thought of another one. People who habitually drive with foglights on really shouldn't be allowed to have a say in the process. And if they drive with really bright foggies on during the day they could be taken aside and shot by goons from the Peoples' League for Taste and Decency.

On a completely unrelated note, I remember being struck just before the last US Presidential election at how many people said they hadn't made up their minds yet, and this was with less than a week to go. One thing that I thought could safely be said about the current President was that he was very easy to form a view on, either for or against, and someone who was still undecided after the first four years probably shouldn't be voting anyway. But of course in the US, as in most civilized countries, people who don't care aren't forced to vote.

Australia has compulsory voting, and Australians are very attached to the notion. It's even a crime to attempt to persuade someone not to vote here. I was once thrown off the electoral roll because I didn't have a permanent address, and in a desperate compromise with the AEC managed to get re-enrolled as an 'Itinerant Voter'. Which is the category for the homeless, the mentally ill and so forth. They explained it to me along the lines of I could turn up in any electorate and vote, so the obvious play was to go the most marginal one in the country and sell my vote. Which I didn't do, only because it would have required a bit of effort on my part. My writing this may violate the electoral act, in which case you can come and visit me in prison.

Mr Burns

I was at the Lowy Institute yesterday (yes, I can tell you're surprised) and listened to a fascinating address by R. Nicholas Burns, who is Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, or to put it more meaningfully, the highest-ranking career diplomat at the US State Department. The content of the talk wasn't tremendously exciting, but it was delivered beautifully. And when it came to question time at the end he was superb - it's that same thing you get when you watch Federer playing tennis, it's just a joy to see someone do something - anything - that well. I was trying to work out what sort of suit he had on; he had that veneer that successful americans (especially new englanders) effortlessly adopt, and it occurred to me that if there were an Australian equivalent to him it'd be a guy with too-big ears and a bad haircut.

The one fun bit - and it caused me and my companion to shoot each other a raised eyebrow - was when he started to say 'the war on terror' but only got as far as 'war', then hesitated and backtracked, calling it instead 'the struggle against terrorism'. I like this a lot more; calling it a war just legitimises the creep of executive power.

QF409

On my usual 0700 SYD-> MEL this morning, and no, you don't end up recognising the cabin crew or vice versa, not even when I was on the flight every Friday morning.

There was an article in the inflight magazine with a heading that started "In the big, brash metropolis of Auckland...". This is, of course, absurdly comic. The nice thing about New Zealand (and New Zealanders for that matter) is precisely that it's not big and brash.

Deborah Hutton was back to her honey-blonde best on the welcoming video and I'm hoping that we've put the Maggie Tabberer phase behind us and we can just pretend it never happened.

What and what?

You know I love it when somebody finds this blog because of a google search ("my lovely older lady', 'very refined place to live', 'dry cleaning wonthaggi', that sort of thing). Well today someone found it by typing 'chunky and muscly' (without the quotes) into google. It's the sixth entry. Or probably the seventh now. Enjoy!

Pigs, and latin.

There's a great story in today's Australian about how the pig industry's in trouble. My favorite bit is this sentence: "Australian Pork's Kathleen Plowman said the industry had literally been decimated: the sow herd was down 30,000 to 300,000." Yes, I majored in Pedantics at Berkeley and so I do notice this stuff, but it would be better if she didn't draw attention to it by flagging it with the word literally.

The other fun bit (leaving aside the whole question of Australian Pork's Kathleen Plowman) is the ambiguous headline. It says "Pig industry appeals to Rudd". But if you really want to enjoy an ambiguous headline (or at least that's what I hope it is) you can't go past this one from earlier this year. Magic darts!

That roommate

This morning there were seven baby spiders on my ceiling and one in my bed. Little huntsmans. One the one hand they're small and cute. On the other hand, pretty soon they're going to be big and ugly. I've developed a fairly humane way of getting rid of them when they're on the ceiling: you scare them, they immediately rappel down on lines of spider silk, you grab the spider silk just above the spider and use that throw the blighter out of the window. As I do this I wonder about the huge huntsman in the living room the other day. Their mother? Are spiders like bears, where the mother hangs around the babies and if you get inbetween the mother and the babies, or she perceives you as a threat, you're a goner? (Hence, once of my favorite expressions, used to describe someone - usually a woman - who's insanely angry. "Like a she-bear with young".) But spiders aren't anything like bears, they're arachnids, primitive invertebrates and mercifully not as big.

I'm big in Syria too!

Not really, but someone in Syria stumbled across this blog yesterday when they typed 'crisis how to kill the last monster' (but without quotes) into google.

UPDATE: I have solved the mystery. There's some sort of slay'em video game that's made by a company called Crisis (or is itself called called, in part, Crisis). So that explains my Swedish and Syrian friends.

New guitar

Got me a new guitar, it's the one on the right in this pic. Here's what I like about it. 1) it looks hot 2) it plays very nicely 3) it's non-obvious. I'll write what I mean about non-obvious when I'm better-able to articulate it.

I had my friend E with me when I bought it, he knew I wanted a new one and suggested we go on a Guitar Safari yesterday. I owe him a dinner.

SIs and the WSJ.

In the middle of an excellent article in the Wall St Journal today, about how Citadel decided to bail out E*trade, there was this sentence:
"It is a humiliating comedown for E*Trade and its now-deposed chief executive, Mitch Caplan, who failed sufficiently to anticipate the impact of mortgage failures. "
To me, this sentence with its clumsy positioning of 'sufficiently' is very inelegant. I'm surprised, I'd expect to see this clumsy avoidance of a split infinitive in an English newspaper, but the US papers have been mercifully free of this. They seem to abide by the rule that if avoiding the SI makes the sentence too clunky or unnatural, you should just use it. Fowler calls this idea about avoiding split infinitives altogether a 'superstition', and Gowers calls it a 'bad rule'. When I have this argument with English colleagues I invariably cite the WSJ and NYT as examples of publications that are better-written then their UK counterparts (especially true of the WSJ) and which aren't bound by this stricture. And which, for good measure, don't carry horoscopes either.
I've emailed the WSJ reporter, I expect she'll think I'm a complete nutter and hit the delete key.

POSTSCRIPT: She emailed back! It wasn't her fault, it was edited by someone else, and she attached his explanatory note. As an extra-special bonus, she said it made her laugh. (With me, I'm assuming, not at me.)

POST POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Fausgang for pointing out the two hideous typos in the original entry. This is why I need G&F friends.

Roommate

I came home quite late on Wednesday night and was checking my mail when I realised I had a roommate. I've become very used to living by myself, and I wasn't best pleased to discover that I was sharing my apartment with a large huntsman spider. The thing was about the size of my hand, and the last one I'd seen this big was in the house I lived in with my ex before we separated. I remember that one well, the kids found it and there was pandemonium in the house, it was like the circus had come to town. The twins came running "daddy there's a spider in our room and the boys are trying to kill it" (you have to imagine this said as though it's all one word to really get the effect), and so I went off to investigate. I was expecting a spider about the size of a 50c coin.

It wasn't, it was f&*cking enormous and I realised, as the boys looked at me, that I was going to have to be brave. While I'm not arachnophic I do have a healthy dose of fear when it comes to spiders, especially ones that look big enough to eat. I trapped it (between a glass dish and a newspaper) and then took it outside, where we released it into the garden to kill bugs. "Spiders", I told the children, "are our friends", and then went off discreetly to have a nervous breakdown.

My roommate spider was in a tricky position and I don't have a garden and having weighed up all the options, I decided to kill it. I had a couple of tries, even using my tennis racquet (backhand, it's more accurate for me) but he was too nimble. Eventually, after he'd wedged himself into a box containing CDs and stuff, I decided that we'd call it a draw. I went to sleep, hoping that the spider understood the deal we had: I stick to my end of the apartment, he sticks to his and if we don't see each other in the morning we pretend nothing happened. (As I described this to one of my colleagues he couldn't help wondering whether I'd had any other houseguests in this category. But my private life's not that lurid.)

Next morning he was gone, or maybe just hiding and I haven't seen him since. My favorite bit in the wiki entry on huntsmans is "They also tend to exhibit a 'cling' reflex if picked up, making them difficult to shake off and much more likely to bite".

Lazy

It occurred to me when I was at the gym today being bossed around by Quentin (which I don't mind, it's like I've outsourced my willpower) that the weights weren't going to lift themselves. Fine, I knew that. Then I started to wonder whether there was any way that, given the amount I'm paying, I could get Quentin to lift the weights, and I just watch. But at the same time, I'd want the benefit of the lifting. Is that too much to ask? I'd pay double.

G & F

I love this. Someone in Chile found this blog as a result of googling 'glamorous & funny'. I tried it myself, it comes up as the second hit. Whahey!

Music.

While I'm at it, here's my piano and guitar. Speaking of retail therapy, I'm going out on the weekend with my mate E to buy a new guitar. I've had this one since 1986 (first thing I bought when I got to NY - well, just about) and even though I love the way it looks I think I need another one. E asked me what I wanted. "One just like the one I have now, only better". The piano I bought early this year, I love it. This pic, now that I look at it, also gives a good sense for how chaotic my flat is.

E once made a record called "Music is a beautiful lady". I have a copy.

Malaise

I'm (again) in the grip of some existential malaise. I flick through the songs on my iPod, I don't like any of them. I mentally sift through my friends and acquaintances and wonder if they really like me, or, in some cases, whether I really like them. I play piano but in a fairly haphazard way.

Maybe what I need is a new computer? This old G4 Powerbook's four and a half years old. It's missing the L key and the K's a bit wobbly. The hinge where it opens is a bit wobbly, on account of it having been dropped on the floor by the twins when they were toddlers.

I went down to the Apple shop near work (no, there's not an Apple Store here yet, that's next year) and did a bit of tyre-kicking, which I always like. They know me there now. I suspect that by the end of the week I'll have a lovely new toy. Then I can donate this laptop (remember I have two, this one - the good one - and the bad one, in a crushingly obvious metaphor for my life) to my kids.

She feels what?

Lovely headline in this Telegraph(UK) article about Patricia Cornwell. (Non-australian readers will be scratching their heads. Sorry.)

Also, on the weekend an article in the New York Times which says that according to Pew Research, 40% of american women aged 25-40 have tattoos. Find the link yourselves if you're interested, I'm going out to buy some mangoes.

Kevin

Headline in today's New York Times, "Bush ally defeated in Australia". So that's it then.

(I won about $500 in bets on this election.)

Tag Game

I was asked today - it was that sort of day - what was the most inspiring thing I'd ever read or heard, and I was at a bit of a loss. I'm a bit too cynical to get inspired by much so I couldn't really answer. But as I was leaving work today I remembered something.

In the late 80s I was living in a graduate student dormitory at Columbia, on 116th. It was miserable, I couldn't sleep, the place was designed so that if anyone in any of the rooms made a noise, I could hear it. For solace I used to listen to the radio, and there was a vaguely alternative station coming out of somewhere on Long Island...Garden City? Late one night, as I was hearing the guy next door, Joel, dribbling a f&*cking basketball in his room (I'm not joking) they played a Jonathan Richman song, 'Tag Game'.

I'd been, like anyone else with any sort of sensibility who'd come of age in the 70s (I know this dates me) unnerved and amazed at the Modern Lovers album, with its strange musicality and naive aggression, and Jonathan's nasal delivery. I knew that afterwards he'd gone a bit strange, songs about being a little dinosaur, a little airplane and whatnot. I only heard the Tag Game once but for years afterwards I could still remember the melody and bit of the lyrics.

Years later I found it on a CD, and I had my own copy. There's one bit in it that I felt was almost a direct challenge to me, my cowardice, lack of participation in things, my general not-being-thereness. It goes...

Well now when Paul starts up the tag game
don't let me be
someone sittin on the side sayin
'sorry, it's not for me'

And each time I heard it I cringed, knowing that when Paul did, in fact, start up the Tag Game, I would be sitting on the side making some excuse or generally trying to convince myself that I was above it all, but at the same time desperately wishing I was the sort of person who'd just relax and join in. I could picture the scene quite clearly in my minds' eye, even down to the colors and the sort of light, and the feeling of guilt and hopeless despair as I excuse myself awkwardly from the game.

I used to sometimes summon up this Tag Game thing as a way of forcing myself to participate, to let go. It worked. And I used the song as a reward too sometimes, if I'd done something particularly exciting or memorable (and this was at its height when I lived in Singapore, of all places) I'd play it in the car over and over as i was driving home.

Postscript: This makes me sound miserable, I'm not. The despair and hopelessness was enhanced for dramatic effect.

Nice girl like you, place like this...?

Fauzward asked me other day why I was so keen to get people to read this blog (he described my relentless self-promotion as 'tacky', which I think is a sign that I've not gone far enough) and was speculating whether I have some pay-per-click arrangement with someone. Nothing could be further from the truth, I assured him. It's purely an attention-seeking thing: I want people to read it, and to tell their friends to read it.

On that note, I'm always curious as to how people stumble across it. Yesterday there was someone from Sweden who found it by googling for 'crisis how to kill monster'. I've spent the best part of this morning trying to imagine the circumstances that would lead someone to type that into a search, and all I can come up with is some swede stuck in a basement somewhere, a looming shadow, flickering light, guttural moans... and the trapped protagonist reaching for his laptop and furiously typing in 'crisis how to kill monster' in a last-ditch effort to save his life and instead finding semi-coherent musing about A, T, V, D, Peter, Quentin and lots of stuff about mis-read signs.

On a completely unrelated note, someone in the UK once found this blog by googling for 'my lovely older lady'. As previously noted. And once, memorably, 'dry cleaner Wonthaggi'.

You get it in a kit?

I was at the gym at lunch (again), doing the body-is-a-temple thing. Today it was treadmill, and the only consolation with that is that I get to watch TV while I'm running. I was a bit late to catch much of Dr Phil, so I had to flip between Oprah and the PM's address to the National Press Club. The PM's a sorry figure now, he seems to know he's beat. I saw him yesterday, funnily enough, as I was walking down Philip St, he drove past in a car full of security guys. Earlier that day I'd seen Costello crossing the street, surrounded by journalists and trying to look like he was enjoying himself. For those who care, I have a substantial bet on Costello retaining Higgins, and if he wins, I get enough tax-free money to buy a lovely dinner for 2 at, say, Toko a couple of times. So I do care.

Anyway, as I was flicking between the two, something on another screen caught my eye. SBS, I think. It was an ad (when did they get ads on SBS? I'm so old I can remember when SBS was set up. It was there as a shining beacon of multicultural diversity. Or as a way of getting a handful of extra votes for the Fraser Goverment from the New Australian community, take your pick).

The ad said, in very big green letters "FREE WILL KIT". I had to read it a couple of times to understand what it meant, and to realise that there wasn't some achingly profound existential thing behind it.

Carnivores

I had dinner with my friend D tonight. She's a vegetarian, and fairly strict too, but apparently has a weakness for pepperoni. In much the same way that the Queen is designated an honorary man when she visits Saudi Arabia (otherwise she couldn't go anywhere and whatnot. Is this true, by the way? It should be) pepperoni's an honorary vegetable. We had thai.

I mentioned to her the story about the German Cannibal, and how apparently he's turned vegetarian in prison. It seemed relevant at the time, but I'm scratching my head a bit now. I was in a shop in rural Victoria with A once, a shop that sold pizzas among other things. A told the pimply teenage girl behind the counter that I was a meatlover (name of a pizza, try to keep up). I had to leave the shop.

Glamorous and funny

I'm lucky to have so many glamorous and funny friends. The most G&F of them all, of course, is F. For all his globe-trotting, fire-hydrant sitting-on ways, he was still good enough to have dinner with me here in tawdry, sad Potts Point and then listen to me mumble incoherently (local anaesthetic, not cocktails. for once).

(In the extremely unlikely even that you don't know who Fauzmond is, look at my facebook friends.)

UPDATE: I knew there was a reason the Fauzmeister and I became friends. I just discovered that he's the only other person on the entire internet who knows the difference between blond and blonde, and like me, has disdain for people who don't!

Tricks

I was having a drink with V last night - and I can proudly say I kept it to just one cocktail, so I wasn't all over the place like I usually am - and we got around to talking about body image and plastic surgery. She was surprised (or more likely, feigned surprise) when I told her what I would have done if I ever got around to it, and to prove my point I showed her how I can waggle my ears. It's a trick that used to send my ex-wife into paroxysms of disgust, and V, to her credit was also vaguely perturbed and horrified.

Texas

There was a lovely piece in the Wall Street Journal called "Freaked Out: Teens' Dance Moves Split a Texas Town". I like the Journal very much; it's beautifully-written, pithy, intelligent, and (on the news pages at least) fairly neutral. Now that it's going to be part of News Corp I'm a little worried. Do we have horoscopes? Bingo? Maybe not. Anyway , this article (and I won't give you a link, you have to be a paid subscriber to read the WSJ) starts...


ARGYLE, Texas -- Karen Miller, 53 years old, saw her first "freak dance" four years ago when she was chaperoning a high-school dance attended by her freshman daughter.
One boy was up close to a girl's back, bumping and grinding to the pounding beat of the music.
"I thought, 'That's just dadgum nasty,'" Ms. Miller recalls. "It really had me sick to my stomach."

And that's where I stopped cold, a sharp intake of breath. Dadgum? It's almost beyond parody. I've never been to Texas but I've always wanted to go. I was once offered a scholarship to do grad school at Rice and was very sorely tempted. I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out if I'd spent those few years in Houston; I suspect it would have been good for me.

Persia!

Get me the smelling salts (no, not the naughty salt)! I got a hit on this blog from Iran!

"It's dead, he's did!"

I didn't get to play piano as much as I'd hoped to last night, but that's not neccessarily a bad thing. I try to keep Friday evenings clear of engagements but generally something crops up, so last night I ended up going out, launching myself into the night all full of promise and blind faith. It was a very interesting evening and I was alseep by midnight (even better).

This morning, after I'd read the papers and had breakfast, I went to a spin class at the gym. (Or maybe it was RPM.. is there a difference?) Until I did one of these classes I thought it was a complete waste of time. My reasoning was that you could, if you wanted to, do it yourself. You could just get on a stationary bike whenever you liked and you could just pedal away like mad and if you knew what you were doing - which i didn't, but that doesn't affect the logic - you'd have the same result but you wouldn't be tied to an arbitrary class schedule, or have to fight with the lyrca princesses for a bike.

But I was so wrong. The critical ingredient is something very old-fashioned and sadly underrated: shame. I don't know if this happens to the others in the class, but whenever I do this I reach a point within about the first 10 minutes where if I wasn't in a group setting I'd just get off the bike and go lie down. But I can't. There's the instructor, for a start, and then there's the 20 or 30 other people in the class, and the walk to the door would be a March of Shame, especially when you factor in (as I have to) the extra embarassment of somehow extricating myself from the bike in a way that's not completely graceless.

So I'm stuck there, and I just have to grin and bear it. I clockwatch, I let my mind wander (and I have some of my best thoughts when I'm under this sort of stress, trying desperately for a distraction. I use the word 'best' very cautiously here), I check out other people in the class.

Today we had a charming New Zealand woman with just about the strongest Kiwi accent I've ever heard. I know it's all very cliched but I do love an accent, and at one point she told us "bug strong ligs". An acquaintance of mine in London (one of the about two dozen people who forwarded me the sex-with-bike story) swears that one day he was watching a Kiwi soap opera (I'm guessing 'Shortland Street' but he can't recall) and he heard this line of dialogue:

It's dead, he's did!

My mate realised that when you run this backwards through the vowel shifts, you arrive at the message "it's Dad, he's dead".

Last note on accents. I have a particular thing for South African accents. And no, I'm not proud if it.

Failover

"Dear BlackBerry user, as a 9 hour power down will take place in Hong Kong this weekend, we will failover the BlackBerry service to the Singapore environment. Unfortunately, we are unable to maintain a service whilst the maintenance is carried out due to the nature of the maintenance." My italics, obviously.

At first I thought 'failover' was a madeup word, or an error. But if you look on Wikipedia it's there (which doesn't make it real, I know. But it's start.)

But if you look the definition of 'failover' it implies that service is maintained through the primary outage. This doesn't appear to be the case on this Blackberry failover. It raises the awful possibility that I may not be able to send or receive text massages for part of the weekend. That's a disaster!

Photo

I was at the gym today with Quentin, my personal trainer. We've been doing this for almost 2 years and we don't talk much, but over time we've developed a bit of a rapport. Today he said "I saw a picture of you on the internet", and as you can imagine my blood ran cold. I think he saw the panic on my face, so he described the picture. It was a snap of me and a friend taken at a gallery opening a few weeks ago.

Weird

Recently a colleague - to whom I really hadn't disclosed anything startling at all - said that I was the weirdest person he'd ever met. But I think that's really just a reflection of the fact that he needs to get out more, rather anything about my intrinsic weirdness. (Which is actually pretty low, I'm remarkably well-adjusted.)

Legless

Four cocktails (or, more strictly, one mixed drink and three cockatails) tonight, and it was with a colleague. I managed to resist the urge to tell all my secrets, although I did let one out. Bizarrely enough, I think he told me something but I was too addled to register it. I suspect I'm not going to be in great shape tomorrow...

Fine

It was, of course, all a misunderstanding. I went over with food and beer. We talked, watched tv. Had a few laughs, marvelled at how life gets stranger as you go on (especially if you work at it a little).

I read a line a while ago about how life is lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. Mine's so chaotic and rococo now that I don't think even that's true any more.

Charming

I was supposed to be having dinner with a friend, who (rather charmlessly, I thought) texted me this afternoon to say that he is about to move house and he has to stay home tonight and pack. But that I'm still welcome to come over and amuse myself in the corner.

My first reaction was that this was a deliberate slight, and I was angry and upset. But I've calmed down now. I know him pretty well and I just can't see him doing that, so I have to take it on face value. But at the same time, I hate going around to people's houses to chat when it turns out they're doing something. I've described to Peter (my shrink, please do try to keep up) in great detail my primal fear of not being able to hold people's attention, and if the person I'm talking to is busy doing something else I get these downward spirals of self-doubt and panic. Same is true if i'm talking to someone wearing sunglasses, so I have a new policy of just ignoring them.

He (my friend, not Peter) has a piano, so if worst comes to worst I can have a bit of practice. A friend wants to come over to my place on Sunday and go through my wardrobe (!!) and wants to hear me play piano. This terrifies me a little. I think she's under the impression that I play actual songs and 'pieces', but the reality is that I can spend a whole afternoon just playing II-V-I progressions in different keys and it keeps me very happy. And when I'm reasonably fluent and can improvise reasonably well, it only works when noone's listening. I fall apart when I have an audience.

Melbourne

I handed over the kids last night then checked into my hotel here in Melbourne, which by some bizarre non-coincidence is where I spent the first night of my honeymoon. I have a colleague staying here too, and we went out for a drink. He assumed that because I'm from Melbourne I'd have a clue where to go, but I almost never go out here so I'm pretty useless. We did, however, find Toff of the Town, which was very agreeable. I didn't have much at all to drink because I was terrified that my urge to disclose would kick and and it so wouldn't be appropriate. The colleague in question sits next to me and it just works better for everyone if I keep my private life and my professional life separate.

I did let out that I was probably having dinner tonight with an ex - an ex that's more recent than my marriage - and he seemed very interested. "What's she like?" etc. For someone who sits next to me and really can't not overhear my phone calls he misses a lot. Then again, he's almost young enough to be my son.

LOTR

My sister said today that she's read the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times, she says she feels a compelling need to read it every few years. This explains a lot.

Cocktails

You may notice I've been rabbiting on about cocktails. I strongly suggest you check out this site. It's my friend V, she runs cocktail safaris and tastings. I don't drink wine (except with you, J) and so all the guff that people talk when they talk about wine leaves me a bit cold, but V does the same thing about cocktails and it's infinitely more entertaining.

Exhausted

My life in Sydney is busy, to be sure, but nothing compares to how busy I am when I'm in Melbourne (like now). Every second weekend my life takes an abrupt turn - I go from being a carefree bachelor and man-about-town in Sydney to being a single parent of 4 in Melbourne, and no matter how much I try to prepare myself for it (sleep is the best thing, and lots of it) it still catches me out. We had a great day today but by 730 I'm drained. We're staying at my mother's, as we often do, and at some level that depresses me too. I'm too old to be staying at my mother's house and doing so reinforces the notion that somehow something's gone horribly wrong, and it's all my fault. Of course I know it hasn't; if anything it's all gone horribly right but when you're a man in his 40s stuck in house in Glen Waverley with his mother (who kindness itself would have to admit has had a couple of drinks and is not entirely on the ball - but am I in a position to judge? Thinking all this just makes it worse...) it's hard to shake.

The children are watching a movie and mercifully are not arguing. I think we're all headed for an early night. I'm in Melbourne til Wednesday (and from tomorrow will be in a nice hotel, thanks to my employer) but there aren't all that many people for me to see here. M is away still, I think. And A..? Well, I just don't know. We sort of arranged to have dinner on Monday night but he's working late and I'm starting to read too much into his fairly terse communications.

Seedy

I'm feeling a little underdone today after having 3 cocktails with V last night -and that was after tennis, and then a very pleasant dinner with my old neighbor, Craig. I now know enough about my relationship with cocktails that I can predict my behavior. I peak at about halfway thru my first one, I get very chatty and sparky. It levels off from there until about the end of the second cocktail, but as I go along I feel the urge to tell all my secrets. And I know that's a bit tiresome, noone wants to hear all that. But the end is in sight. Once I start on my third cocktail I'm struck dumb, and everything (including my brain) is covered in fine gauze. I can still think, just very slowly, but I have no ability to move my mouth in any way that resembles normal speech. (I used to see this happen to my father, but he had a much bigger tolerance than me.)

So yes, I was a bit seeedy today but luckily I was very busy so just channeled my seediness into activity.

It's true

This is worth always bearing in mind:

Unsolicited advice is criticism.

Monster

As I was getting the train to work I saw a big poster ad for Beowulf. The tagline for this movie is: "I will kill your monster". I will kill your monster! I'm going to be using that line a lot for the next couple of weeks, but of course I'll be saying it in the way that Death said "you have sunk my battleship" in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. (And no, I still haven't seen the Bergmann movie.)

Prom the Pilipines

I had dinner in Lidcombe tonight with my friend Ivan. ("Where the f*%k's Lidcombe?" someone texted me.) We started off as tennis partners, and we were well-matched. We'd play, maybe saying a few words as we changed ends, that was about it. Then when I did my ankle we started going out for dinners together instead. We share a craving for culinary and cultural exotica, and we jointly coined the word bizarricality to describe the exact quality we were looking for.

Originally our criterion for restaurants was that they had to be 1) representative of the cuisine of a country or region that was troubled, at the very least, or ideally, at war and 2) yummy and 3) weird in some other way. This last is where bizarricality comes in.

The highlight was probably a Lao restaurant in Fairfield where the waiter was a 10yo boy, the restaurant was next-door to a funeral parlour, the menu was on a series of laminated cards with a barbie-style holder and we had warm beer with ice in big cups (just like in a 'men-only' bar in Taipei, I told Ivan. I'm thinking of 'funky'). Food was great, and the whole evening had a surreal air to it with the wierdness just layering nicely.

Next best was the Polish Club in Ashfield, where the highight was the deli downstairs where the nice polish ladies made a huge fuss of us because we were so enthusiastic about the smallgoods. They recognised kindred spirits, I like to think. They were very pleased with our reaction to the tongue sausage. Then there was Peruvian, African, Burmese, Serbian (where we nearly died because Ivan forgot and called the bloke a Croat), Sri Lankan...

The Filipino place wasn't all that great. I remembered a colleague of mine who'd had occassion to visit the central bank of the philippines and discovered, there in the waiting area on the executive floor, a jukebox. He said that was when he finally understood the Philippines.

2 songs

Well, hardly songs. But see what you think.
vaguely countryish
not sure what you'd call this

Upside

I started off today in an existential fug, a what does it all mean, Basil? fit of soulsearching and disquiet. But then two very nice things happened around lunchtime. I got a very nice letter from the government with a big cheque attached to it (I'm a banker, I love money). And the other thing was absolutely none of your business. So there.

Weekend

Friday night, went home from work, had a 2-hour nap then out for a drink with S. Home and in bed by 1030. An amusing evening. But vaguely disappointing. She sees me as a friend and confidante (which is exactly right) but sometimes I'm left wondering whether I'm too nice.

Saturday night I had about sixteen thousand drinks with my lovely friend J (hello J) which was fun because it was about time I told her what my story was, as opposed to the vague half-truths I was peddling last time we were friends.

As a consequence I was a bit of a basket case yesterday. No gym, no yoga.

Contact

I went to see 'Control' during the week with J, her boyfriend and another friend of hers, who earned my undying emnity by whispering to me as the movie started "It's near Manchester". Ah fooking know where Macclesfield is!

I was vaguely aware of Joy Division before Ian Curtis died, but for about a month afterwards I must have heard that album about a thousand times and I got to really hate it. The music sounded better after 27 years. Hearing it immediately transported me back to the scuzzy flat in St Kilda that seemed to have been the center of my world back then. Music does that.

Lovely acronym

I can't believe I haven't stumbled across this one before, but I was reading an account of the Phil Spector trial, and it described the victim as an "AMW". This, apparently, is a widely-used expression in entertainment circles, and it stands for "actress, model, whatever...".

Napoleon

I was all ready to leave my place this morning for my weekly appointment with Peter, and as I was leaving he called me. He had leprosy or something, the whole side of his face had blown up. "But what about me, Pete? Who's going to address my needs?", I didn't say. Actually, I was quite pleased, I think I'm running out of problems and I think he knows it. Much as I love having someone listen to me for 50 minutes even I can recognise that it doesn't have the burning-wagon-rolling-towards-the-cliff-edge urgency it had mid last year.

So I went downstairs to the lesbian cafe to get a coffee, and the charming young women there mentioned how unusual it was for me not to be in a frantic rush. "I was supposed to go see my shrink, but he cancelled", I told them, and it seemed to stop them in their tracks. "I hear voices, and I'm often convinced I'm really Napoleon, or Sammy Davis Jr", I most certainly did not say, although judging by their reaction I might as well have. I went upstairs to play piano for a while after that. Nice coffee though.

Laundry (or Llaundry, for welsh readers)

I've been living in my apartment for a year (from tomorrow) and I go through phases where I don't like it. There's something strange about the building; I think it was originally a hotel of some kind and the apartments do have a vaguely hotelish character to them (there's a vestigal slot on the wall as you come in to my apartment where, I assume, you'd put your keytag to operate the lights and whatnot). About half the apartments in the building are in fact let out as serviced apartments, and so the inhabitants of the building fall neatly into either of two categories: permanents (like me) and transients. The transients are usually european (there seems to be a bit of a skew towards eastern and southern europe), we never get north americans. I don't mind the vaguely hotelish character of the place - it makes it seem a bit more like something out of a novel, and besides, I've had some of the great experiences of my life in hotel rooms.

The place does have an aural quirk - as you get out of the elevator on my floor and stand in the hallway, you can hear quite clearly what's going on in each apartment. It's very disconcerting. Once I'm in my apartment I can't hear anything, it's just when you're in the hallway. This used to worry me quite a bit.


My apartment's on the top floor, overlooking a little park. It's very light and fairly quiet. That's why I like it. I lived once in a very dark apartment and it nearly drove me around the twist. At the bottom of the building is a coffee shop which people who live around here usually call 'the lesbian coffee shop' but it's not. It was at some point in the past, and the name's stuck. Everyone knows it's not, but we still call it that. I think it appeals to our longing to live in a raffish demimonde sort of place. There's a reason we're here, not Mosman. When I first moved here the guy who then ran the lesbian coffee shop took an instant dislike to me (maybe just to save time?) I still don't know what I did wrong. But I've outlasted him now, he's gone somewhere else - prison, i hope, in New Zealand - and the new people are quite agreeable.

The building has a shared laundry in the basement, student-style. I don't have a particular problem with that as a concept, but some people don't seem to get it. There are two washing machines and three dryers. The washing machines take 30 minutes, and it's written very clearly in great big letters. (You can see where this is going, I know.) So people put their stuff in, leave and.... don't come back!

Here's the quandry. I go down to do my laundry. I have a very busy life and I don't need extra complications. Sometimes I get down there, the machines are busy.. fine. I wait, come back later (or just go and buy new underwear, it's easier). But sometimes the machines are cold and idle.. then when you lift up the lid, they're full of clothes! I overthink things, so I start to wonder. Has the machine just finished like a second ago, in which case for me to huffily take it all out and put it somewhere would seem unreasonable, prissy... weird? I notice as I think this through that it's women's underwear and stuff and I don't want some angry bint coming in and accusing me of being a pervert (which I'm not, or at least not in that way).

So I leave it.. then I come back 15 or 20 minutes later. It's still there! I start imagining the conversation that will occur when I start to put the clothes somewhere else and the woman comes in:

her: oi.. what are you doing?
me (defensivey): i'm emptying the washing machine.. there was stuff in it.. i wasn't sure...
her: but i was just about to come down and do that, how dare you..
me: well how was i to know you were 'just about to come down'? what if you were another hour? is there some point at which you'd consider it ok for me to do this? or is it an ironlcad rule that noone can mess with your stuff even if you leave it there all afternoon?

Luckily I've never had to have this conversation, I suspect I'd play it very badly. Must go....dryer time!

Salt

I read somewhere recently that Princess Margaret used to call cocaine "Naughty salt". As I write this I'm almost hysterical with tiredness, I really must sleep sometime. (And no, it's nothing to do with the salt.)

Roots

I'm from Melbourne but live in Sydney. I'm in Sydney most of the time but I do spend quite a bit of time in Mebourne, at least every second weekend. Someone quite recently was asking me which of the two cities I felt most at home in, and I gave some vague answer mostly to the effect that I'm happier in Sydney.

He then asked whether I had more roots in Sydney than in Melbourne now. I said with a straight face "definitely Sydney". I very nearly lost it, but you'll be pleased to hear I managed to keep (most of) my composure. I expect that non-Australian readers will be scratching their heads now. Don't worry, it's a localism.

Call me 'General'

I just overheard a colleague talking on the phone and using the expression 'general consensus'. I wince, it's a tautology. As is 'mass exodus'. You have been warned!

Along these lines, I heard something described as 'a panacea for all our problems'. Same. Am I too delicate for this world? I told someone recently that I majored in Pedantics at Berkeley (a line from a Woody Allen movie, if I'm not mistaken). They believed me.

I'm feeling vaguely seedy today and very tired. I had a 'breakfast martini' with my friend V last night and no, before you ask, it's not a euphemism. Then up at 0525 to get the 0645 to Melbourne. It's going to be a long day. Nothing a stuffed roti wouldn't fix (again, not a euphemism).

Lady

I see someone stumbled across my blog as a result of tying in google (and I notice it's google uk): my lovely older lady

I'm not sure why, but this really tickles me. I do have some issues with the word 'lady' anyway (see a much earlier posing about adult dating sites) and one has a bit of pathos too. My friend E once released a record which he was going to call "Music is my special lady" but he was persuded by some pinhead to change the name. D'oh!

Rehab

At the suggestion of my friend E I bought Amy Winehouse's CD. It's great, as he said. And what I like about it is that it's shamelessly derivative and at the same time, strikingly original.

new iPod

I had a lucky break today, my old ipod mini finally gave up! A lot of people have never even seen an iPod mini so I felt like I was carrying around something that was steam-powered, but it's served me very well over the last 3 or so years. I was listening to it this morning at the station when I ran into someone I know (avid readers - are there any? - will remember my 4-cocktail bender with 4 women a week or so ago). I couldn't resist showing her that the very song I was listening to was, in fact, by me.

Anyway, just after lunch it decided to stop working. So I immediately went to the shop to buy a new one. It's a lovely blue Ipod nano, pretty much the same blue as my old mini. Back then I got matching his'n'hers, my wife's (I was married then) was pink. I sometimes used to sneak stuff onto her ipod to see if she reacted. I put Anthony and the Johnsons' "Fistful of love" on it, and after about a month she asked me if there was some message behind me doing that. I also gave my 9yo son a good collection of Brian Jonestown Massacre, Leonard Cohen and Thelonius Monk. He lost his ipod shortly thereafter.

Mmmmmm! I'm now loading it up, with what a charming young lady who recently visited described as "one third hard-core country, one third David Bowie and one third just plain weird stuff". Which is pretty accurate.

Bach

I was at a piano recital this afternoon (yes, I susprised you, didn't I!), a very intimate affair, and the first thing the guy played sounded very much like Bach but also in a funny way wasn't Bach, there was something a little not-exactly-18th-century about some of the harmonies, but it was very compelling. Anyway, the pianist said it was Bach.

I tackled him at the interval and said how much I loved the Bach piece and how it surprised me because it had a harmonic richness that you wouldn't normally expect in Bach (and yes, I was aware as I was saying it how cringe-inducing the phrase 'harmonic richness' is). He said yes, Bach does have this great emotional density and whatnot, but then said that he had, in fact, put in a few extra notes. Well you can imagine how chuffed I was to hear that - I'd sort of picked it. Whatta stud! On an amusing trivia note, the pianist was the guy whose hands were playing the Rachmaninoff in 'Shine' when Geoffrey Rush was at the piano. Not that I saw the movie, of course.

Putting it off.

It occurred to me that I've undergone a major conceptual shift in the way I think about putting things off. Let me explain...

I live alone now, after 12 years. And, for example, if there's dishes that need to be done (which itself is a pretty rare thing, I'm such a bachelor) I look at them, lying accusingly on the bench (the dishes, not me. I've only ever lain on the bench once, under circumstances you don't need to know about), and I think "I could do them now, or I could do them later". The me of 12 years ago would have been happy to leave them, but I think that I've finally come to understand a fundamental fact about the universe and our place in it: doing something later isn't actually the same as not doing it all. It sounds obvious, but I didn't really get it before, I guess at some level I assumed that if I didn't do them now it was somehow equivalent to getting someone else to do them. But I remind myself sometimes if I can feel this slipping. Who exactly am I expecting to sneak into my apartment and do the things I've put off? Maria Callas? Zsa Zsa Gabor? The Bush twins? Actually, the last one is quite appealing. I had an acqaintance who was a professional dominatrix and would, in fact, have people come in and vacuum and tidy and whatnot, naked. But I can't see that happening.

Watery laptop

In the course of a very fitful and not-long-enough sleep (I have a bit too much going on at the moment, I'm too excited to sleep) I had a dream where for some reason I was outside by the pool - not sure which pool, or whose, but I was there - carrying my two laptops. The two were both closed, and stacked one upon the other. Both were on. I do in fact have two laptops, and in a crushingly obvious metaphor for my life they serve two different functions. One's the Good one (work stuff, music, photos, garageband), the other's the Bad one (you don't need to know much about that one).

There was a shallow water feature, about 6 inches to a foot deep. I was tired and distracted (even in the dream) and so I put the laptops down, into the water while I was about to do something else. As I did so, I realised that I'd, in fact, put them into water, and that that was definitely not a good thing for a computer. Cursing (thinking of the money, and all the files and stuff on them) I hauled them out.

I started with the Bad laptop first (and I'm trying not to read too much into this) and I prised off the keyboard and shook all the water off it, turned it upside down and shook it. The indicator lights were still on, which was a bit of a surprise.

Err.. and I can't remember what happened then. But there you go. I'm trying this on the Bad laptop, which is a bit unusual for me. Enjoy.

Sunday Papers

From time to time, I peruse various dating sites, and I'm struck by how many people say that they really enjoy lying in bed and reading the Sunday newspapers. Ladies, it's Sydney!

Legless

I was out on a cocktail bar crawl last night with some women (a setup that I can't help but find mildly titillating, even though there was nothing like that involved) and I had a bit of an epiphany. Cocktails are great - you get a bit giddy and excited but not full or messy as you do with beer, which has been up to now my preferred drink. I had 4 cocktails and when I got home (which was only 10pm) I was staggering about talking to myself.

A truly excellent evening! And I don't feel too bad, so far. Nothing breakfast and a coffee wouldn't fix. One of the fun things about being the only man in a group with 4 women is that they don't moderate their conversation as much as they would if there were more men present, so as we had more and more cocktails the conversation slowly but inexorably got raunchier and raunchier. It's probably the alcohol talking, but sometimes I start to think I really am getting to understand women (this is a dangerous and foolhardy train of thought, I know).

Columbia pussies

I was reading a story today about the vanishing idea of free speech on campuses and they mentioned the story about the men's hockey team at Columbia being suspended after putting up a flier on campus encouraging men to turn out for hockey, which included the line "Stop being a pussy".

This reminded me, when I was at Columbia (about a thousand years ago now) I had a girlfriend who was on the men's lacrosse team.

Dinner

Too much food and too little sleep - I'm feeling very lethargic. Dinner last night with an ex (no, not that one) at a great place in South Yarra. No menu, they just ask what sort of stuff you like and don't like, then the chef whips something up.

The waitress took a dislike to us, I think we confused her. Understandable really.

The previous night I'd been out for dinner with an old friend who was telling me she'd met the love of her life. She's overjoyed and it sounds like the real deal. She won't tell me who it is, but I figured it out. Food was terrible.

Lunch yesterday at The Melbourne Club, which was quite agreeable. What I liked was that it made me feel like a youngster.

Empty.

Tonight I handed the kids back to my ex, on her return from the US. I'd been living in her house for 8 days, hanging out with the kids on school holidays.

As always, I find myself feeling very spent and empty after handing them back. It really shouldn't be a surprise, this happens every time. But it's the same - I feel guilty elation at finally getting rid of them, then a horrible strange sadness as I shake myself and try to remember what the rest of of my life's like, the bits where I'm not doing laundry, cooking, playing, trying to stop them killing each other. It's made worse by my having to stay here in Melbourne for a few days, and even though I say I love Melbourne it makes me sad and confused - I don't know many people here, I'm sort of homeless. And I can't escape the feeling when I'm here that my life's gone nowhere, I'm back where I started.

So by 7 o'clock tonight I'd handed the kids back but was left feeling profoundly sad and uneasy. I drove about aimlessly for a while getting more and more agitated. Driving around Melbourne like that reminds me of being about 20, and how inner-city Melbourne seemed like a magical playground where anything was possible. Now it all seems so hopelessly small-scale, but I know that most of that is just me being jaded and middle-aged, and it's that effect you get when you look down the wrong end of a telescope.

At one point this afternoon I took the kids on a slight detour from our usual route and we ended up parked outside a decrepit-looking house in Clayton North, just opposite Monash University. "Why are we here? What are you doing" etc... but it was the house I lived in when I was the age my oldest son is now. Back then it was a nice, smart big (double-block) house, but in the intervening 35 years it's been split up and rented out as student housing. The yard was all overgrown and in the middle of it was an old car that, judging by the undergrowth, hadn't been moved in years. "Is that your car from when you were a boy?" inquired my younger son, momentarily interested.

I probably didn't need to see all that today.

Playing with numbers..?

In the middle of an otherwise-boring article about parking in Bondi (and I know you'll have a view on this, TC) there's a little passage which really struck me.

The gist of it that shopkeepers at Bondi Beach had complained that parking meters at the beach suppressed foot traffic to their businesses, and hence, by implication, that if parking was free there'd be more customers. This doesn't sound implausible - fair enough.

But what the council did was to remove the parking meters to see if it had any effect on the number of people using the carpark. It turned out that when the meters weren't there, there were fewer people, and quite a significant number fewer.

Now, if you're the acting president of the Bondi and Districts Chamber of Commerce, and the owner of a shoeshop in the affected area you have two altervatives. You can either scratch you head and say "well, maybe the recent decrease in shopper numbers is due to some other factor not related to parking meters", or you can point out some methodological flaw with the experiment - I bet there's a lot of seasonality on parking numbers at Bondi, and weather-dependency (just to pluck two out of thin air) and even if there's not you should at last say that. As anyone who's ever watched "Yes, Minister" will know there are a number of very obvious ways to attack any study whose findings you don't like, and I would have thought that a non-properly-controlled trial that's run and monitored by a party with a vested interest should be a ludicrously easy target.

So exactly how did Max Siano, the shopkeeper in question, deal with this? He said:

"They can play with figures as much as they like. Meters and parking fines have been the major cause of the downturn of business at Bondi Beach." Clearly Mr Siano's not someone who's ever going to be swayed by mere evidence, or for that matter, someone who's capable of engaging in debate.

I know this is a long way from my usual stuff (food, sex, funny signs) but it really struck me. I probably need to get out more.

Ricecakes.

I'm living in my ex's house this week. She has a stash of ricecakes as lo-cal snacks. I've discovered they're great if you put quite a lot of butter on them. D'oh!

Blubber (not, it's not another one about my body... settle down!)

I'm in Melbourne all this week while my ex has gone to the US. I've moved into her house and am being Mr Mom to my 4 (yes, count 'em, 4!) kids. They're all quite different to each other, as kids are, and I bond with them in very different ways. Yesterday I had a sublime bonding moment with my number 2 son, one of those things that adds a bit of texture and oomph to our relationship.

My children, and especially the boys, know that I'm unhealthily obsessed with food. If I'm not eating or talking about food, I'm usually thinking about it. And I do notice that we use food, and especially stories about food and shared experiences around food to reinforce our sense of insiderness. I notice my older son (almost 11) will often bring up some food-related experience as way of bringing us together, and he often asks questions of me like "What's the worst meal you've ever had?", or , more interestingly, "What do you think is the worst meal we've ever had?" To which the answer is usually a dinner we had in Greece. The boys and I reminisce about meals we've shared, we re-live these experiences as a way of staying together. It does seem more important now too; I live in a different city, I don't see them all the time. It's these things that tie us together. So every so often we go over the sequence of events that led us to have the best ribs we've ever had, in a roadside place in Florida, or the meal we had once in an Indonesian restaurant in Melbourne where the was a knife fight in the kitchen.

Yesterday number two son (aged 9) and I decided to cook what we call "pig leg soup", which is agreeably fiddly and messy to make and has a couple of other interesting qualities. When cold, it's quite solid, so you can tip a container of it on its side and it just doesn't flow. Naturally, we do this each time as a test of consistency, sometimes with dramatic results if we haven't gotten it quite stodgy enough. It's very gassy, but that's also amusing.

Constructing pig leg soup has two phases. The first phase involves putting a big ham hock in a saucepan with lots of water and a few other things (thyme, an onion, a leek, a bay leaf and so on) and simmering for a hell of a long time. At the end of this phase, we take the ham hock out of the pot, let it cool just a bit, then the fun starts. Number 2 and I each get a knife and we attack the ham hock. We strip off the skin and the fat, or as he calls it, "the blubber", and we eat about half the meat ourselves, up to our elbows in pig fat, scoffing down chunks of too-hot meat and bits of fat. As we go we tear pieces of meat into little chunks and put it back into the soup. It's very messy and very primitive and atavistic. Number 2 even eats some chunks of pure blubber attached to pig skin, he seems to have a double-copy of the fat-loving gene that my mother's family carries. We stand in the kitchen shoulder-to-shoulder (well, shoulder to hip; he's only 9) and as we strip the flesh from the ham hock and wallow in the grease and fat I feel a profound sense of being in exactly the right place. The light changes color, time slows down. I can imagine doing this with number 2 in 20 years time when he's a grown man and has a job and a car.

Years ago when we were living in London and my ex (she wasn't an ex then) had gone to New York for a week, I cooked roast duck. The duck was agreeably fatty and when I pulled the roasting pan out of the oven there was a big pool of duck fat there. I used some of it to toss the beans and pasta in (I really cannot cook at all but once in a while i stumble across something that works) and then I still had quite a big quantity of hot duck fat. I called number 2 (then aged 6) into the kitchen. I showed him what to do. For the next few minutes we stood side by side, silently and very purposefully dipping slices of bread into the red-hot duck fat and scoffing it down, mouths burning. We talk about it still.

I had a fabulous sleep, including a dream where I actually stood up to my ex (who, just for the record, is a very reasonable person if handled correctly). In the dream I had had some chronic illness for which I needed specialised treatment (not unlike my Hep C, but also in some significant ways different. It was a dream, after all). As part of the treatment I had had to go to Geelong (go Cats). My ex was going through the documentation (receipts, medical reports) and something about it wasn't making sense to her. She started grilling me about it. Who did I stay with when I went to Geelong for treatment? My first thought was to lie, but I said 'with a friend'. She wasn't impressed but accepted it nonetheless.

Being found out is a very common theme in my dreams, and yes, I've discussed it with Peter at great length. Strangely enough, my friend A has exactly the same sort of dreams - even down to the two major sub-genres. More later.

Fire and death

I was cooking breakfast this morning for three of my children and my number 2 son - age 9 - was talking about how much he likes fire and how when he grows up he wants to do something that's involved with fire. I suggested firefighter but he said that sounded too dangerous. Then he elaborated:

"I want a simple job but one that doesn't get you killed.... but one that does get you killed, just not too often".

Wreck, and backhand.

On the one hand, my lovelife's a trainwreck. But on the other hand, I played tennis last night and my backhand was superb. These things do rather cancel each other out.

One day last week I was in the building where I work, talking with a colleague as we were going up in the elevator. We stopped short of our destination, the doors opened, there were two men in suits either side of the door. Each of them gestured for the other to go in. There was an uncomfortable silence, then, as if in slow motion, the elevator doors closed without either of them moving. "You go first." "No, you go first..." It serves them both right.

You see, in a situation like this, if someone gestures for you to go in first it can be a mark of respect (more on this later, if I remember), or a power play. How? The gesturer is saying to the gesturee "Look, I'm allowing you to go ahead" and, also, possibly "you look like you need help, whereas I, on the other hand am very capable". I'm quite up to the task of getting into an elevator and I don't need someone to usher me though, so I find this all vaguely insulting. I was first aware of this when I was a starving graduate student in New York and I noticed, with growing irritation, than an Italian friend of mine would always do this. Any doorway, anywhere. He'd get to it, hold it open, smile graciously and motion you through. At first it was charmingly continental, but after a few hours of it it started grating, and it took me quite a while to acknowledge my annoyance (which seemed, and still does, a bit churlish).

I have some young colleagues who try to hold doors open for me, and I quickly educate them. "The rule", I tell them, "is that the person closest to the door goes through first", although I do of course recognise that in doing that it's only good manners to hold the door open behind you as well.

There's an extra twist to this. What if the group contains one or more women, as sometimes happens even my industry (my workplace was once described to my ex by one of the other wives as "a sea of men", which I like to imagine she said in a somewhat breathless way). I've given this some thought so that you don't have to - you'll thank me for this later, I can tell.

If it's a social situation - and especially if any part of it has a date charcteristic - then holding the door for a woman is a pretty safe bet. If it's at work and she's a client then also, holding a door open is a good bet, but that also applies to male clients too, and it's part of the respect and control dual nature of the gesture. It says "you're my guest, I treasure you" and at the same time "I'm in charge, you're on my territory (and by the way can I order you a coffee?)"

But what if it's a female colleague, someone you wouldn't otherwise hold a door open if she was male? I say don't hold the door, and I know most (certainly in my building) would disagree. I think that door-holding sends a message along the lines of "you might think that going to law school and winding up in a high-powered professional role might earn you some respect, but to me you're just a babe in a skirt", but then again I do tend to over-think these sorts of things.

I explained to a female friend the other day (who I did, in fact, open doors for) why it is that men holds doors for women, and generally let women walk in front of them. It's so we can check out their butts. I had thought this was obvious but she was surprised and vaguely titillated. She did give me a very strange look over her shoulder a few times that evening, I expect in an attempt to catch me leering at her behind. But I'm quite a bit smarter than I look (which is just as well).

Like a what, exactly?

I was talking to a friend yesterday and he used the expression "..face like a dropped pie". Maybe I need to get out more - has this one been around for ages and I just haven't noticed it? It's succint and not quite so self-conscioususly smartarsed as some of the other (still delightful) alternatives:


Face like a:
.... half-sucked mango
.... hatful of spiders

Or, as an old friend of mine once said, in an improvement on the spider one, "face like a hatful of spiders, but with the three good-looking ones taken out".

The same friend who gave me the pie one knows that I'm very keen on colorful expressions, especially if they're crude. He told me (and I doubt he would lie about this) that many years ago he was having a drink with his then-girlfriend and her mother, and the mother excused herself to pee by using the phrase "I have to go and squeeze my mop". I've only heard this once since, at a dinner party in London. It's almost too good.

New name?

One of my colleagues at work said that I should be called 'Fergus' and I made the mistake of saying that I didn't like the name. So now I'm stuck with it. D'oh! They've even changed the nameplate on my desk.

Supersize me!

If you go to 7-11 to buy a slurpee, as I often do, you're faced with a decision. They come in three sizes: small, medium and large. I usually only have slurpees when I'm in Melbourne, I think because I need them more down there, but I had one today in Sydney (hangover, three beers last night) and I was musing about this size issue today.

The small costs $1.70, the medium $2.00 and the large $2.30. When I first started on this downhill spiral of slurpee abuse earlier this year (in an episode I described to my friend Melanie as me sitting in a borrowed car in the parking lot of the 7-11 in Mount Waverley, having a slurpee, banging my head againt the steering wheel and weeping) I used to go with what seemed like the value play. The medium's much bigger than the small, the large is, in turn much larger than the medium and it seemed reckless and foolish not to just get the large. It's about twice the size of the small, and not much more money.

But after lots and lots of research (I have a good mental map of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, with all the 7-11s on it) I've come to a shocking conclusion: the optimal size for a slurpee is small.

"How can this be so?", I can hear you ask. "Have you taken leave of your senses?". And so on. Just calm down. No, the horrible truth is that if you get a big slurpee, when you get about halfway through it you get a bit bored. You reach a point you never imagined existed - the point where you've had enough slurpee. (In the same way that as a 16year old, you can't imagine how, as a new parent, exhausted after sleepness nights, you can be too tired for sex.)

After quite a bit of empirical work, I realised that this point - the point where the marginal utility goes negative - is about where you would be if you'd only had the small. So there's your answer. I know you'll thank me for this later.