Archive for December, 2006

yes, we all know memes are lame, but Jeremy has tagged me, so, since we’re in holiday mode…

1. When I was a kid we had a small hobby farm just outside of town, where Dad ran about 30 head of Hereford cattle. We kept horses as well, and sometimes took them on family holidays there, spending the days riding and playing in the bush, staying in a caravan and heating water for the bush shower in a big copper over an open fire. I think I learned the meaning of solitude and the value of space there, and I miss it.

2. I was in the Navy Reserve band for a brief while when I was first at uni, because they paid something like $60 a week for rehearsals. That was a lot of money to a uni student in 1988. I quit when they said I had to sign on/up properly and would really have to start wearing the uniform. I was shithouse at the marching and stuff anyway.

3. I’ve played Jimmy Galway’s solid gold flute (or one of them), at a masterclass once. It was heavy. and sounded awesome.

4. I had a story published in the Sunday Mail when I was about 9 or 10. It was called ‘The Last Battle’, and despite sharing a title with a C.S.Lewis Narnia book, was not a fantasy. Rather it concerned a fight to the death on the “dusty plains” of the outback between an old male “boss” kangaroo and his younger rival. Unlike Narnia, where good triumphs over evil, in my story the older kangaroo died (by being squashed “until his ribs cracked sickeningly and his eyes popped out”) because he was older and weaker. Cheeful, huh.

5. I am the world expert* on the musicological distinctions between and the ideal structural forms of the power ballad and the rock anthem. And because what may seem like a perverse love for Celine Dion is actually based on a Kantian, disinterested master-knowledge of the affective aesthetics of the genre at which she excels, you can’t diss me for it.

I tag Mel, Josh, Marika, Axel and Jaz next.

*self-appointed

I don’t know where I’ve been for the last 3 months (well, yes, of course I do – Thesis Hell), but I seem to have come out the other side. It might be that some of the pressure is off, or the realisation this is the only holiday I’m going to get until this time next year, or it might be waking up crying with pain from a frozen shoulder earlier in the week, but at I’m having a bit of a break and am staying away from the office until the new year, when I will finish writing up. In the meantime, I keep a hard copy of my thesis on the kitchen table, where I can write notes in the margins every 15 or 20 minutes, or whenever something occurs to me, as well as a big notebook where I can write out ideas at length. This seems to be working surprisingly well. But on my iBook, the Microsoft Word icon sits quietly in the dock, where it can bloody well stay for a week or so.

What I’m doing instead of hunching over Word for 12 hours a day like a prematurely aging scholarly Scrooge:

1. using, instead of critiquing, Garageband – mainly very peaceful, minimalistic stuff
2. cooking beautiful fresh food for myself and those I love
3. reading a couple of those books-I’ll-get-round-to-one-day: The Idiot and Bleak House
4. Christmas shopping
5. reading the paper (although sometimes I wish I hadn’t)

…and so on and so forth. I choose to believe this is all going to make me more intelligent and efficient in the new year. And I hope you all enjoy the break as much as I intend to!

And not the band either. Considering the anaemic, socially conservative mess that is the Australian Labor Party today, and the fact that Gough is probably a bit over the whole running the country thing, I think we should start a Margaret for PM Campaign.