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.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, October 5, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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!
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, October 1, 2007
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.
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.
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