(which is a Twin Peaks reference, if anyone’s keeping track.)
I rushed out and bought new shoes last night, shoes fer exercisin’ in. I’ve had none since I left New Zealand, which should give you an idea of my current level of fitness – still the same skinny, only now I get tired easily instead of having pretty decent stamina.
Anyway, I’d let myself fall into that trap of not getting the kit because not involved in anything, and not involved in anything because not got the kit. Silly. My sport of choice, basketball, is pretty hidden up here, and I just haven’t seen much else to get enthused about.
Then my boss said ‘come play basketball tomorrow lunchtime’ and i said ‘woohoo’ and now I have new shoes on my feet and a pleasant exercised-tingle in my legs. Lets hope I keep finding avenues in which to play. I’ve got the shoes now, anyway.
—
The shoes are Adidas. I’ve been a Converse boy for years and years, but Converse were bought out by Nike I believe, anyway their shoes are nowhere to be found. So I went with Adidas. They work. I did buy some extra foam inners at the salesguy’s suggestion, and can’t work out how much the decision was mine and how much it was me being suggestive-sold – definitely a combination, but I don’t know the proportions at all. Six quid for foam inners? Crikey! They are extra comfy though, and I rationalise to myself that they’ll make injuries less likely, which is important when coming off a period of no exercise, and… I think I got suggestive-sold. Damn. Am I too lazy to go for the no-questions-asked money-back guarantee? Probably. We’ll find out!!!
—
A bulletin board I frequent was recently attacked by internet trolls, who (I discovered today) were mocking us on their own bulletin board elsewhere. I had the dubious distinction of being quoted and called a schmuck and a dope. Hmm, I haven’t been called names behind my back since primary school, which is about the level on which the trolls are acting.
The experience is kind of meh really. I’m not even remotely angry, but I’m certainly not amused either. It is indisputable that the people involved were being dicks, of course – deliberately trolling a foreign bulletin board for cheap laughs is one of the cardinal sins on the net. Still, I can’t quite seem to laugh it off. Instead I find myself wondering what is going through these peoples’ heads, and whether this kind of behaviour will always be present in the new realm of the ‘net, where concealed identity and the limitation of communication to text only are the default situation and human tribalism rears it head the same ways as usual.
Hey, wow – I just realised that I haven’t forgiven them! Stupid trolls. Do they deserve forgiveness? Hmm.
(For the less net-literate, trolls are folk who post contentious/stupid comments in order to heat up an argument. They win their game when people respond. Yes, it isn’t a very complicated game.)
~`morgue
Lost In Translation
I have a new phone. It is small and therefore finicky. When I use it I feel like my hands are too big for the job, like I’m King Kong trying to undo the clasps on Fay Wray’s brassiere, only sorta less dirty and hairy. Hmm, maybe that’s a bad metaphor.
—
Cal and I saw Lost in Translation last week. One thing I’m kinda struck by, on reading the coverage and reviews, is how no-one seems to be talking about what’s abundantly obvious to me – Sofia Coppola has based the entire movie on one of her early-teen fantasies. The whole setup is straight out of an intimacy fantasy typical of a daydreaming twelve-year-old girl: the young, pure girl-woman given the opportunity by contrived circumstances to interact with an older, famous movie star who is himself looking for a deep emotional connection, and they spend lots of time together, clearly fall for each other, but do not act on their feelings because they cannot escape their respective cages (and also so the fantasy remains, essentially, pure). It’s the kind of chaste romance a 12 year old girl would imagine for herself.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to read the limbo of jetlag Tokyo as symbolic of the cusp between childhood and adult, where one becomes aware of a new kind of intimate connection between self and other and imagines what it must be like without including sexuality.
After all, Sofia Coppola spent her whole life on film sets, staying in hotels and meeting famous actors. Her films have revealed her to be exactly the kind of imaginative and sensitive person who would write long diary entries filled with yearning for something not entirely understood. I think it’s extremely unlikely she never had the kind of fantasy this film is a development of.
Of course, she’s smart enough as an adult to ground the film without destroying the character of its fantasy. Bill Murray’s character sleeping with the chanteuse is a perfect example – an awareness that the fantasy character is not fully real, and in reality such a person would have a surplus of energy that had to go *somewhere*.
The final stroke of genius, of course, was the final interaction between the two. Sofia Coppola has put a private (if not unusual or uncommon) fantasy into the public domain, but kept the keystone to herself.
I really liked this movie, by the way.
The Little Old Man
Sometimes I would catch the bus to work. There was a little old man who would catch it too. He would be on the bus, upstairs, without fail.
Recently Cal and I moved. On a completely different bus route, I catch the bus to work.
The little old man is on these buses too. It is the same man.
What is he up to? I am afraid to speak to him.
NOTE: he walks very quickly, for a little old man.
My Grandmother on LOTR
Exiting Return of the King:
“And after all that, they lost the ring!”
She is teh coolest grandmother. Yay Felice!
It Pleases Me
The Following Please Me:
* keeping up with the fate of the NZ entry in the Australian Basketball League by way of http://www.kiwihoops.co.nz – particularly the rise and rise of Dillon Boucher, whose story should, by rights, be repeated in every NZ school and playground (cue usual rant about New Zealand identity)
* hearing that some of my friends are friends with others of my friends
* watching people make risky but right decisions
* patience, humility, compassion
* Freddy vs Jason
* chai tea (current hot drink of choice)
* Tongan Ninja, the closest thing NZ has to a Flight of the Conchords movie, being on sale in the local Blockbuster
* Tongan Ninja actually being quite entertaining
* seeing people I know in Tongan Ninja and, indeed, in any film (credits included – they also serve who don’t appear onscreen)
* hearing from people I haven’t heard from in a while
* not feeling overly busy
Note: Other Things Also Please Me.
[morgueatlarge] The Hogmanay That Wasn’t!
[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent January 2004]
Edinburgh’s big street party to see in the new year has become somewhat infamous over the last decade, and is now reputedly the biggest in Europe. It’s certainly a folded page-corner in the Lonely Planet of many a traveller. The Hogmanay celebrations run for days, with events both ‘afore and after.
I was newly arrived in Edinburgh for last year’s Hogmanay and the ever-prepared Blair managed to produce a ticket to the street party for me. The party is free but ticketed, and once the free ones go the black market starts up – it’s typically up to £20 for a ticket, depending on how lucky you are and how late you leave it. Anyway, we got in, jumped around, looked at the fireworks and had a right old good time!
This year, after some plans to be in Belgium for the holiday season fell through, Cal and I agreed to open our home to antipodean orphans, and so we had a strong compliment of good Kiwi folk for the big day, including Alastair Galloway who materialised out of the rain at about 5pm on New Years Eve. The rain was heavy and it was cold and windy. Reminded me of home, to be honest – wind and rain always do. With his pack safely stowed at Broomhouse, we went to a favourite eatery for an Eve dinner, filling up the central table with Cal and myself, Alastair, Julian, Yuuki, Sibs, Trimmy and suspiciously non-Kiwi Kathleen. Guid fuid, induid, followed by leisurely chatting until the arrival of Jess with her own band of Kiwi travellers. And we set off.
The rain was coming down with some enthusiasm now, but spirits were high. Even the wind didn’t feel too bad. We passed through the gate, our wristbands checked, and descended the slope of the mound towards the massed throng in Princes St. Thousands of people filled up the road. We dove straight in.
The strange absence of music was soon explained as we wandered near enough to a speaker to hear the PA announcement – the street party was cancelled. Nasty weather. Everyone had to bugger off home. Thank you very much for your co-operation.
Miserable outcome! We wandered through the crowds for a while, soon finding that even the midnight fireworks on the city’s seven hills were cancelled. The largest rendition of Auld Lang Syne ever was right out.
By the time the minutes of 2003 were running out, we had found ourselves near one of the entrances to the street party, on the outside as it happened, where a large number of people had just decided to stand around and wait. This we did. One game punter scrambled up a lamppost and stripped off his clothing piece by piece, tossing it out to the crowd. It was unclear whether he gave up when down to his trousers due to modesty or because of he understood the lethal difficulty of trying to strip them off in the wind and rain atop a streetlamp.
Soon the ragged cheering of midnight’s arrival began, as everyone’s watch and cellphone separately decided the time had come. Everyone snogged everyone else and smiled happily, because that’s all they wanted to do anyway, street party cancellation or no. Members of our little circle proved instrumental in beginning a rather large circle singing Auld Lang Syne, not to mention lots of more general jumping around hugging people and an astonishingly successful and seasonally inappropriate conga line. It
were cool fun.
In the steadily improving weather we wandered around to the Grassmarket beneath the castle, and were eventually let into The White Hart, a lovely wee historic pub, reputedly haunted (not exceptional in Edinburgh), in this case by the ghosts of the victims of Burke and Hare, the bodysnatchers who once worked the area. I saw no ghosts that night, except perhaps the face of one of our number who proved rather the worse for wear come four in the morning. The rest of us had a lovely big yarn to all and sundry in a nice warm pub. And then finally home to bed as the clock swung past five.
A happy night. Condolences are not necessary, at least to me. Those poor geezers who flew up from London and paid quids for worthless tickets – they’re the ones to console.
And then, by the way, it was 2004. And so it still is.
———
This year the night afore had giant metal elephants instead of big pink giraffes. For what it’s worth.
———
And we’ve moved at last. In Belmont Gardens now. Step out the front door to a view over the tops of houses to the distant Pentland Hills to the south. Sweet. (Not to mention a housely guest book that reads like a greatest hits of my university friends.)
———
Hello to everyone! Those off to Kapcon this weekend – my best and fondest regards.
Cheers
Morgan
Some New Costs
So, should we broadband?
Rent is a given, albeit a new one.
Should I put my phone on contract instead of pay as go?
Could be an expensive year, all these costs.
Mostly, though, I want to whinge about the crap tech that is my old Nokia 3310 phone and, by extension, most cellphones, for having internal singular batteries that don’t cope well with continual top-up charging and even when taken care of eventually end up with a battery life of 3 days even when not used.
Bleah. Stupid phone. I’m sick of having my phone beep in my ear and hang up all my calls for me.
~`morgue (contract gives me new phone, at least… hmmm.)
Over ‘Ere
Bradley departs. He’s the reason I ended up in Scotland in the first place; he invited me, told me Edinburgh would suit me, and gave me a place to stay on my arrival. For the past year-and-a-bit he’s been my friend-from-home. (Which is not to forget Blair, who did the first few months, and Cal, who did the last few, nor all the friends-from-home based in London and other places.)
The cliché of the Kiwi on OE (non-Kiwi readers, OE = Overseas Experience = the reason why middle-class Antipodeans are working in your local pub) is you get a job and a flat and then sit tight with your circle of Kiwi mates in whatever city you’re in (i.e. London) and embark on the occasional bus tour through Ireland, drinking trip to Prague, café trip to Amsterdam and mission to a Germanic beer fest to keep your travelling hand in. And then two years later you go home, wondering if you did fit in enough travelling, really.
There’re reasons for this. Take the travelling one. Once you have a job, it’s harder to disappear off the beaten path and go randomly travelling for a month. If you don’t have a regular job, it’s hard to get enough money together to live on, let alone fund a trip to the continent. The old catch 22.
The friends-from-home thing is a bit less of a logic game and a bit more of a psych undergrad’s 1am theorising. What’s indisputable is that for most folk, staying close to friends from home becomes a big deal when you’re on the other side of the world. It’s not just about using people from home as a crutch or safe haven, but something a lot more enigmatic – something to do with perspective and scale, and with identifying what we value in life. Not to say safety and ease aren’t part of the equation, but it’s too easy to sneer at this trend.
Most New Zealanders will fall into some variation of this trap when they travel, unless they have chosen destinations more exotic than the big, obvious cities. I’m certainly in the trap. Of course, and this is also the standard cry for mitigation, “I’ve also engaged with the locals!” (Such as they are in Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital city is a large swirl of immigrants and travellers anyway. If you want Scots, it is commonly understood, you’re on the wrong coast – Glasgow where you head for that.)
I have a bunch of friends who are not from South Africa, or Australia, or New Zealand, and we get on fine. But I’ve had almost as many friends here who are New Zealanders as friends who are not. Almost all of them I didn’t know before arriving here – the other obvious fallout of travelling, that if you meet someone from home on the other side of the world, you have an instant conversation starter and enough common ground to make friendship easy.
Sometimes this has bothered me, this business of being in Scotland and passing time with New Zealanders. Then I realised something, and now it doesn’t.
I realised, simply, that when I look at my friends, I don’t see any difference between the Kiwis and the locals (not to mention the travellers from other lands again). It’s so obvious I hadn’t even realised it – they’re all in the same big category of ‘friends in Edinburgh’. And if that’s the case, then the only way the from home/not from home distinction matters is in justifying to myself, and others, that I haven’t squandered my travel by spending too much time with people just like me.
So I’ve realised that now. And I’m not going to give the matter another thought, because I don’t need to justify anything to myself. They’re all friends. They’re all just people, and I like ‘em. Och.
(Note: this point of view does nothing to mitigate the ‘didn’t travel much’ thing. If I believed in New Years’ Revolutions, that would be one – to have travelled to enough places that I’d look back this time next year and feel like I hadn’t wasted a moment on this side of the world.)
Anyway, Bradley departs. He’s heading back to New Zealand, for at least the immediate future. Wellingtonians, watch out for him. Buy him a beer for me.
[morgueatlarge] Edinburgh X-Moose II: The Snowing
[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent December 2003]
I used to make my own Christmas cards, the infamous Why Be Normal series that emerged each December (and often on birthdays, too). The pinnacle of these, in ’98, involved musing on which was better, real or fake Christmas Trees, and working it out by putting them both in a wrestling ring and
letting them fight it out. I don’t think I’ll ever be funnier than that. So I don’t do those cards any more.
It’s snowing today, big white cornflakes drifting down. Cal’s first snow. It’ll be our first Christmas together. And since this is my second Christmas in the northern hemisphere, I get to be all knowledgeable about
things and touched by how excited Cal gets at the snow. (Of course, anyone who saw the video I sent homewards will know quite how excited I got at the snow last year.)
It’s looking to be fun. Old friends Julian and Yuuki are heading up from London to warm our hearth on the day itself, and we’ll also be joined by new friend Kathleen, one of the many Christmas orphans in Edinburgh. I know of a couple other orphan-gatherings and with luck we’ll find a way to crash all of them by the end of the night. (With luck no carols though.)
Then the famed Edinburgh Hogmanay. Again, my second one of these, this time mustering a fair roster of folk instead of just-me-and-Blair like last year. (Hi Blair!) We all have to sing Auld Lang Syne at midnight and everyone’s getting a water bottle with the words on so we can all learn it. I intend to just grunt drunkenly instead of worrying about proper type words. Should be magic.
I’ve now been resident in Edinburgh for over a year. That’s sorta shocking to me. Time flying and all that. I’m still in the same place and job I’ve been in since March – Broomhouse (little Bosnia to the locals, apparently) and Queen Margaret University College, still doing the same nonsense, still six foot four and a half. Cal is well settled now also, and I’m finally getting used to having someone else around 24/7, after so many months of random solitude and independence. I loved living alone, but I think I like hugs-on-tap a bit more.
Slowly getting momentum back on writing stuff. The New Novel is stirring once again in my cerebellum or my occipital lobe or my camille paglia or whatever the neurojargon is. Various short bits are waiting in the wings also. Bit disappointed that I haven’t achieved professional publication yet but I think my lack of actually submitting stuff might have something to do with it. Complicated business, what what.
Lots of energy has been going into eternal time-sink of roleplaying games, but with good cause. The Ottakar’s Roleplaying Club that I willed into being six months ago is thriving and building a new generation of collaborative-creative minds whose enthusiasm and damn good ideas keep surprising me week after week. I’ve also had the privilege of leading a game called ‘Providence Summer’ which was about kids and teens in 1961 Providence dealing with the failures of their parents and the hard choices of finding new futures. The five players delivered wild plot twists, deep and engaging characters and heartrending emotional arcs. Every contention I have had, that roleplaying can produce experiences as powerful and real as any other fiction medium, has been borne out in this game.
Speaking of which, it was a great thing to see Return of the King on the big screen. The local connection, of course, but also the message that this is sending to the mass-marketed creative sphere, in tandem with Harry Potter – story is everything. Lord of the Rings will be making money on DVD for decades. Who the hell will be watching Matrix Revolutions in two years’ time? Every hope I had for these movies, back when I first heard that Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla were forcing Peter Jackson to put Kong on the backburner and Rings was announced as the new project, has been fulfilled. We’re looking at the defining pop-cultural moment of the new, er, 25 years or so, just as Star Wars was key for the last one.
I am a happy morgue.
I miss home, a bit. Mostly I wish I could be having all these new experiences without leaving all my friends and family on the other side of the world and out of my life (endless stream of welcome visitors excepted). Looking forward to seeing all your faces again.
Take care, everyone. Compliments of the season.
Peace and love and, seriously, goodwill to all.
~`morgue
Why Be Normal?
Mooses for Hooses
Mezzy Xmas. Hey, off work! Like my job. Better, like my workmates – immeasurable benefit of two levels of damn good folk above me in management line, plus competent bodies left and right. Makes it all so much easier to be the shop of sanity in the institutional ocean of bloody foolishness.
Snow. Shopping. Yuck to shopping. Fed fed fed. Dancing kittens, well, cats. I have become a dog person although I distinctly recall once being a cat person. Still like cats though. Evil, wicked beastses that they are. Stupid fat hobbit! Snow on the roof, in the garden. Riding in the bus.
I still haven’t watched Alien3 workprint cut. Am I cured? Answers on back of an envelope please. Please. Mind the antelopen.