Category: Self-ish

(THE LAST DAY OF EXISTENCE)
The car is parked on the Napier waterfront & I’m in the front listening to the thud of bass. People movement. A day that has been foreseen for so long. I drove up alone in two stretches, a break at PN, the exultation of geography, the Manawatu Gorge. I realised why mother begged the kids to look we had to be her eyes, it was our duty to experience & appreciate simply because we could…
…just saw Aurora and her flatmate Cassie, here w/ Aurora’s band-boy, we get ice cream and now I have chocolate topping on my beach pants. Symbolise that!
Sunlight is caught up in grey clouds like it can’t kick through. I feel underneath. And, oddly, far from alone.
I’ve referred to tonight’s soloist escapade as a happy suicide. I’m using it, this festival, to reiterate my preference for isolation, to focus and refocus in, to strip myself down. 8 years ago tonight I changed, started on a road that has led here, away from all who I know – alone in a crowd. So easy to interpret life as narrative and see the precursors to this, images and themes echoing back and down through years. 1999 has been a culmination, bringing a new freedom, the entirety of which I am only just beginning to appreciate. I have removed my cultured self by layers, folding each back and sloughing it off, and now I’m learning to live without guides and structures, not of time or need or respect; there is only one more category to lose now and that is Me as Me. Happy suicide; tonight I remove even my self. Like the years, I parcel it up and lock it away and move on, a new cycle, build a door just to open it, and free of feedback I move to dawn.
The Air India hijack continues a week on. Giant speaker stacks are playing ‘party like it’s 1999…’
Party like it’s now.

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I kept a journal through 1999. Reading over some of it recently, I realise how much of it is coded so only I will ever see most of the content – this entry contains literally dozens of loaded words, packing in context and references that only I will get. But I want to take a moment on this blog to record that moment ten years (er, and a month) ago when I finished the journal, finished the 90s, and finished an eight-year process of ‘learning to live without guides or structures’. I can’t imagine myself without that process. It was how I created a version of myself I could properly and happily be.
Perhaps significantly, about three weeks after writing the above entry I met Cal for the first time.

Beautiful wife persuaded me that it was time to get a new chair. Through careful viewing of photographic comparison above, an alert reader may notice some slight differences between the two chairs, namely that one is a tiny bent hollow with a back that doesn’t go up any more, whereas the other is a majestic throne with a high, curving back.
Should have done this years ago. If this improves my comfort levels a tenth as much as the ergo keyboard has, it will be money very well spent.
Note, also, that the chair’s back curves away from the lower back, rather than in toward the neck. I only mention this because every time I get on a plane it’s bloody torture on account of some genius who thinks chairs should have convex backs, particularly if you have to sit in them for twenty-two hours. Arg.
Ahhh. The comfy chair.

(Let’s give this blogging thing another go, shall we?)
Cal and I got civilized a year ago. Anniversary was a week ago. It has come up a year awful quick.
Main thing about it being a year on is, people don’t say “how’s married life?” quite so often.
– which is almost ironic because it’s only this deep that you start to work out an answer to that question. Namely, it’s much the same but awesomer. It feels different. Like climbing up to a hilltop lookout, the horizon gets further away and the view gets more interesting.
How patient is my Cal? I went role-playing on our wedding anniversary day. That is hella patient.
My love for Cal: [@now]>[@then]

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This gives me another excuse to post Steve Leon’s lovely highlight reel, too.

Thank you parents!
Graduation last night. I can now put MSc after my name. Nice.
Way back when I last graduated, I had no interest in going to the ceremony – the pomp struck me as, well, pompous, even grotesque, and at a considerable remove from my values at the time. It didn’t strike me so much as a celebration of achievement, but rather an encoding of social difference, and one beholden to a foreign social system at that.
The big ol’ ceremony is still there with its crazy robes and hats and formalised interactions, and it doesn’t bother me so much these days. However, I was pleased by the beautiful waiata and resounding haka performed by family and friends in the audience when many of the Maori students took to the stage. They brought the whole ceremony to a standstill, disrupting the smooth process and the expected role of the audience. I liked that these mighty and heartfelt performances did not fit with the old-Europe ceremonial structure, and in fact seemed almost to be a response to it, an assertion that academic achievements do not belong to the old culture of Europe but to all peoples on their own terms. It was an uneasy fit, and that’s exactly as it should be at this stage of New Zealand’s bicultural development – an uneasy equilibrium, two parts pushing against each other, still working to find a sustainable balance.
Anyway, it was a nice event for me, I got to wear my kilt and remember the madness almost a year ago as I was racing to hand in. Here’s hoping for a relatively quiet summer for a change – been a long time since I’ve had one of those!

Speaking of going home again… in a few hours, Oor Scottish Friend Malcolm hops on a wee plane and flies back to Scotland. It seems like only yesterday that we ordered him off of Amazon.co.uk: Scotsman (Falkirk), housetrained, scribbles words. We had him delivered, and we read the instructions carefully, about how we weren’t supposed to feed him after midnight, and god forbid anyone should call him English…
…and then it was time to open the box and meet our new Malc for the first time.

Safe home, Malc ol’ buddy, safe home. See you in May!

It was getting cold as we wound our way up the hill. We didn’t have a place to stay, and intended to stay up all night, as most of the Mexicans were clearly planning. In the cemetery, a small flat space chunked out of the hillside and crowded with plots, locals were starting to gather at gravesides, raising big wreaths of flowers and lighting candles.
– my trip to Patzcuaro for el Día de los Muertos.

Read the rest of that visit here.
The pic above is a (never-before-revealed!) picture of my travel buddies at the time getting some food on the island at about 3am. The stone street whose steps we are sitting on is the one that winds all the way up the island to its peak.
Had a good Halloween, too. The knifeman brought the party, like he does every single year. Some unexpected faces there too, great to see them. Mostly I like Halloween. My reservations are entirely due to the fact it doesn’t quite fit here in NZ – the time of year is all wrong, for a start – and it isn’t integrated into our culture in any meaningful way. There’s a lot of suspicion, in particular, as to this “trick or treat” business where children proceed from house to house and ask for sweets! AND THEY DON’T EVEN NEED TO WORK FOR THEM! The logic of trick or treating is founded in ritual, not production-based education, and that’s a bit of a hard sell around these parts – we’re leery of the rituals we do own, and adopting new ones doesn’t come easy. Nevertheless, I like trick or treating in principle. If you want to bind communities together and encourage neighbourliness, dressing little kids as monsters and giving them treats seems like a pretty fun way to do it.
Then again, I mostly learned about Halloween from Peanuts. “I got a rock.”

Man, taking a while to get back to normal rhythms here. Lotsa sleeping trouble in this house. Crashing out early or wide awake too late or waking up in middle of night and being stuck that way – all variations on the theme present and correct.
Plus, what feels like a low-level allergic reaction, like all the pollens changed while we were away and my system can’t handle all the new information coming at once.
Not used to this. Idea was to spring back into action at speed. Dear mother said, on seeing me, that I looked younger (and something about bein’ all chubby faced), which I guess means that the “get some rest” goal was achieved, probably for the first time in years. Shouldn’t feel too bad about the slow start then, I guess – all for the greater good.
Anywise. Gonna keep taking it relatively easy this week I guess, try and get myself set right. Yup.
Reading: 100 Years of Solitude. Highly entertaining. Started on last day of honeymoon, only about half-way through. Looking forward to the solitude to start, figure any moment now one of these dudes will get stuck on a desert island with no-one to talk to by his anthropomorphised volleyball! Now that’s what I’m here for, great literature, why you beating around the bush?
Wikipedia says that I can cure my jet lag with viagra. At least, that seems to work for hamsters. Why are hamsters out jetsetting anyway? Some people really spend too much money on their pets, man. Just leave the hamsters at home.

(sent out to the morgueatlarge list)
Numerous water buffalo
Two elephants on the hill road
A baby elephant the next day
A hand-sized spider in a web the size of a tablecloth
A critter that looked kinda like a grey squirrel only it had a long
long coloured tail
A small family of rogue pigs (warthogs?) in the backroads of Karon
Lotsa skittery lizards
Two sloths, who have mostly hung out by the pool or on the beach,
sipping juices and cocktails and reading books and generally wondering
how they swung this particular sweet deal
Love,
A Sloth In An Internet Cafe In Phuket Town

I’ve got to do my part of my performance review tomorrow. Been trying to make it work tonight and it just eludes me. I have my KEY RESULT AREAS filled in and my KEY COMPETENCIES marked out but trying to relate everything I’ve done and learned and assembled in the last year in a little box is defeating me.
I actually don’t even know what type of thing I’m meant to write in the little boxes, it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these things. I sort of just want to write the same thing everywhere:
Done all this stuff, more or less.
It’s the more or less that makes it work. Because it’s ultimately entirely arbitrary isn’t it to try and capture the complexity of these relationships between me and other people, between my system inputs and the responses of the system, between my shaking of the spider’s web and the spider’s jerky approach, to try and capture them in a little box and rate it with a letter grade… Except it’s not really about capturing these relationships, is it? It’s about enabling a certain vector of communication. The performance review isn’t about reviewing performance – that happens all the time, in an ongoing way, the manager is always reviewing the employee’s performance, the employee is always interpreting their own performance. Maybe the process is really about manager and employee being able to send some important messages to each other.
So what kinda message do I want to send, I wonder?
No-one puts baby in the corner
In space no one can hear you scream
Send more paramedics
Hmm. Much to think about.

Cal and I are going to have a holiday on a beach in Phuket. (According to google, the picture above shows the specific beach we’re at.)
It’s all sorted – over a week of chilling out and doing nothing much at all. I’ve never spent more than a couple days chilling out and doing nothing much at all, I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope.
I guess this is our honeymoon. Choice.
We fly out October 10th. Looking forward to some good monsoon action!