my kingdom for some meaning

 my kingdom for some meaning  journal  4 Responses »
Mar 282013
 
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I've taken to singing. All the effing time.

I have songs about burps (they're nasty); nappy changes (they're awesome); boredom grizzles; the fear of sleeping; the necessity of sleeping; the insidious and all-too-easily-missed-or-mistaken nature of weariness; socks that won't stay on; the loveliness of whichever drink bottle, chandelier or featureless wall she currently finds fascinating — you name it, I've probably sung about it. An awful lot of my songs are, lately, to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it…"

I am so. utterly. sick. of myself.

Reactions to the rats have been mixed

 journal  2 Responses »
Dec 022012
 
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After being the only parents at the childbirth education class to have absolutely nothing prepared for the oncoming baggage (everyone else had, I quote, everything prepared), I've spent the past two weeks buying shit. Mostly because I have now reached the point where, on meeting me, strangers involuntarily cry out in shock, or alternatively eye my stomach thoughtfully and pronounce me "ready". (Pretty much all conversations now are held with my belly. It's mesmerising, I guess.)

People have also started asking if I've packed my hospital bag (er, must get on that…) and what my birth plan is.

Are you kidding me? The plan is to have the child. That's it. What more do they think I have any modicum of control over?

So, yes. Money flying out the door, even though I'm doing a lot of second-hand purchasing. And all of it on stuff that is really, genuinely, not in the least exciting.

Well, except the stuffed rats I bought for the cot.

I really, really love the stuffed rats.

I call them The Alonsi.1 I imagine they are already whispering among themselves of which particular pieces of rattish wisdom to impart first.

  1. We are not allowed pets in the new flat. Since I am very deep in pet-deprivation yearning, when we spotted a very plump rat scampering through the front garden, I promptly named it Alonso. You make do with what you have. [↩]

wait, who let september happen?

 journal, writing life  4 Responses »
Sep 162012
 

Yesterday, I kited myself off to the suburbs for a photography outing. The set-up was simple: a friend needed guinea pigs for his portraiture assignment, and a whole slew of dirt-poor and socially terrified authors could do with having an up to date publicity mugshot if the offer was on the table.

As I was getting ready, the pterosaur decided to try and prepare me for the process by pulling out his own camera and bombarding me with photos, paparazzi-style. Mostly, I pulled faces at him, talked all through his efforts (which always results in photos of me wearing the most bizarre expressions), and generally acted like a muppet.

Here, for example, I am channelling my inner marabou. I don't think I'm particularly successful because I've seen a marabou exactly once, and at no point did said marabou look in any way bemused.

Unfortunately for all concerned, this panic-induced mania did not change when I actually reached the proper shoot, I must say. Which I suppose will have given the poor photographer excellent training in dealing with difficult subjects, but at the same time, there's now a very real chance there will be photos of me looking like some sort of science exhibit (Sept 2012: Crazy Lady, Looking Terrified) going into someone's portraiture assignment. I've decided to consider this a win for diversity.

And hey, after all that malarking about, I was fed a hearteningly strong cup of tea and the most delicious twitter cookies.

Tweet! Tweet! The cookies: on Twitpic

creativity is an addiction

 journal, writing life  2 Responses »
Jan 262012
 
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A golden outfit made from spider silk has gone on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum:

The four-metre-long hand-woven textile, a natural vivid gold colour, was made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar by 80 people over five years.

I remember hearing about endeavours by scientists to mass-produce spider silk. The approach, if I remember correctly, was to modify the DNA of goats so that spider silk proteins were produced in the goats' milk. I even wrote a (terrible) story around that premise during my stint at Clarion South. But I haven't heard any more on that front for years — I wonder what happened?

I never knew that anybody had collected enough spider silk by hand to weave fabric from it, which is apparently an until-now forgotten art.

The effort involved in such an endeavour — catching the spiders every morning, harnessing them into contraptions designed to extract their silk, making thread out of the silk and textile out of the fabric — the patience and time and labour that has been poured into it is … humbling.

It made me think about all the energy that I pour into my writing. Sometimes, when I'm tired, when I'm frustrated with my chronic time-poverty, it's easy to feel dispirited. About a lack of progress, or the latest mental block, or the sheer enormity of the task still to go. And I can't whinge, like I want to, because I chose this, and I keep choosing this. Every day I choose writing. (Even if it feels like a Clayton's Choice, but that's a topic for a whole different post.)

It helps me to stumble across stories like this. Tales of fascination, and the endeavours born out of and carried onwards by that fascination. Perhaps making a coat out of spider silk does nothing for us on a practical level: but I, for one, smiled when I heard of it. And felt inspired.

And now I have a new trick to add to my toolbox for when I get the grumps with the process: I shall simply consider my words to be little golden orb spiders. All I need to do is catch a few dozen a day, and coax them gently into a pleasing order.

And hope the wily bastards stay put.

self-esteem extremes

 journal  3 Responses »
May 192011
 
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Last night, I had occasion to search through my archived emails, and in doing so I discovered a story of my day which I related at the time to cheer up a friend. It was an offhand account, but it's also nevertheless word for word a true account, and I share it with you now because it is simply too amusing not to.

Identities have not been changed, because there are no innocents in this story.

Enter stage-left, Neal and Deb, who are clearly talking shit, as per their normal practice, but the details are not important and so we watch them get into the car (Deb with slightly more difficulty because she is attacked and harangued by belligerent garbage bins in the process) before we hear their conversation. There's a pause. Neal puts on his seatbelt.

Deb: Oh! Yes, seatbelt. Good idea. Yes. I'll do that.

Neal: Hey, it's your life you'll be saving and all.

Deb: Oh! Yes. Although I was just thinking about your licence points. Which is important.

There is a moment of silence.

Deb: You know, I think there's something wrong with me, isn't there? Because apparently I just rated your LICENCE POINTS higher than, you know, my LIFE.

Neal: Well, dude, I did wonder about it myself — and clearly you have some sort of self-esteem issues going on — but I wasn't about to bring you even further down by pointing it out. Although I do thank you for your concern over my licence points.

Deb: I think I need counselling.

dear grandchildren: your grandmother has the wrong number

 journal  4 Responses »
Feb 152011
 

There is in Melbourne a little old Eastern European1 lady, who has the wrong number. Namely, my direct line at the dayjob.

She doesn't call often, all told. Somehow, she knows exactly when I'm not at my desk, be it through illness or holiday or simply the fact that it's 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. That's when she calls. And listens to my voicemail announcement stating my name and place of employment. And finally leaves me a long and rambling voice message in her mother tongue. She's not disgruntled, and though to my ear her language sounds a little growly I suspect she's just chatting. Leaving a message for a family member.

Does she not wonder why her family member's home phone number has such a strange, business-centric answering machine? Is her only contact with this family member through my phone — does she never meet her in person, even once a year, and in the inevitable confusion discover that her messages were never received? One message, which I discovered on my return from Mongolia, was at least five minutes long, full of lilting incomprehensibilities.

I wonder what she's telling me in those messages. That I never return her calls? Not to eat the boiled sheep's head? To get back to work already, lazy sod?

  1. I'm guessing [↩]

google patents. it's better than tv.

 journal  2 Responses »
Jan 052011
 

One of the misconceptions I had buried in the back of my head, before I started my current dayjob, was that inventions were all, by necessity, clever.

This turns out to be not the case.1 See, in assessing whether something is an invention, there are two main hurdles:2 it must be novel, and it must also be inventive.

Novelty's easy, and fairly self-explanatory. There are some technicalities in terms of what constitutes usable proof, and timing considerations as to who had the idea first etc, but basically it's either been done before, or it's new. Easy.

Inventiveness isn't any more complicated, per se, although it is more subjective. The test for inventiveness is simply: is it obvious?

Pay careful note to that. Something that's unguessably clever is not obvious, yes — but equally, so is something downright stupid.

office consensus is not inventive in light of a porcupine

Actually, I don't know that I'd argue the shark protector suit there is stupid, as such. Let's just say I'm dubious as to whether it's really a better solution than, say, a cage. Which will protect you. The suit itself, so far as I can see, will simply give the shark some nasty scratches while it's giving you some nasty scratches. But maybe that depends on the size of the shark.3

  1. If you want to talk about inventions that see commercial success, that's a whole different conversation. [↩]
  2. There are other hurdles, quite a few of them, but they're less to do with whether it's an invention and more to do with whether the invention is allowable, legally. So for the sake of simplicity… [↩]
  3. That's the other thing with inventions. There's always, always a smaller niche. [↩]

strange how my heart breaks

 journal  6 Responses »
Dec 122010
 

Before I moved to Melbourne, I'd never lived without at least one family pet. My knowledge of the various critters starts with two Siamese cats — Bubbles and Cuddles — who, if they weren't in the house when I was born, were acquired not too long after. My mother tells stories of one of them (I forget which one) having a worrying love of pouncing on my baby brother's bald head.1

Over the years following there have been cats2, dogs, canaries, budgerigars, fish, a horse, rabbits (both normal and pygmy), and even a tortoise at one point. Although we found the latter laboriously crossing the road in front of the house one day, put him in the backyard, and lost him under the back fence one day — so I'm not sure we can claim ever owning him so much as we fed him while he (very, very slowly) passed through.

Down this way, a variety of circumstances have meant no pets.

Or at least, that's what I thought. As it turns out, care of that most hypnotic of time-sinks otherwise known as TV, I've recently discovered that in fact I have a multitude of pets.

They're popularly called water bears or moss piglets (which is not one but two awesome names), their scientific name means "slow walker" (which makes me think of something out of Star Wars), and they can survive the vacuum of space.

That, my friends, is one heck of a combination of cute and hardcore, right there.

and look! are they not fatly adorable?

Of course, since they're so teensy, I don't actually know how many of them I have in my sink. But that doesn't matter. I'm going to call them all Chewbacca.

  1. He turned out just fine. In fact, he all but speaks cat. [↩]
  2. I think the maximum at any one point was 7: 2 purchased, 1 who followed my younger brother home (when he bought fish and chips) and the 4 mini-cats she soon thereafter surprised us with [↩]
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