It must be a uniquely tech-industry thing to come back from a vacation and within hours see an email that the digital footage of your escapades has already been edited and posted on YouTube. As you can see we got up to quite a lot of fun, even outside all the skiing which isn't featured in this video.
Since there is too much to catch up on since my last post, I'm going to let the photos do most of the talking, but here is a brief synopsis:
New York City (photos)
Spent a nice fall weekend in NYC. I think it's one of the few cities you can keep going back to because there's just so much to see and do. I'd already done all the usual touristy things (Empire State building, Wall St, etc. etc.) on a previous visit and the weather wasn't super, but there was still more than enough to fill four days, just walking around the various neighbourhoods, visiting museums and parks and catching a local poetry slam and an Aaron Sorkin play on Broadway (The Farnsworth Invention).
Victoria (photos)
I went to visit Sam who moved to Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) about a month or so ago. It was my first time there, even though it's just a ferry ride from Seattle. It's a cute, quiet little town with lots of historic buildings and some nice little shops and eateries. Next time I head to Vancouver Island I want to check out the Pacific coast which is meant to be really rugged and beautiful.
Halloween (photos)
Although it wasn't my first 31st of October in Seattle, I didn't do much last year except visit the scary corn maze in Everett. This year my friend Jordan organised a Halloween party so I got right into it! I went to Red Light (a thrift store on Broadway) and managed to put together a Mary Poppins outfit, then added some fangs and blood makeup to make it Scary Poppins. It was good fun to see everyone dressed up. And I won best costume!
It's been a while since my last entry; I haven't really been in a writing mood, but I thought I'd post something as a sign of my continued existence. Some things that have been happening:
Australia
I went home for a couple of weeks. It was great as usual. Even though so much has changed since I moved away, it takes about 40 seconds for me to become completely immersed in life at home again. Except for the light switches being the other way around and driving on the left and things like that, which took a little longer. Funny how the superficial differences take longer to get used to than big things like being with family again.
I squeezed in the usual catchups with friends, and as usual most of them felt too short for either party to do any more than skim the surface of what's rolling arouund each other's heads these days. I guess that's part of life; drifting away from people to such an extent that although you trust each other to talk about things, you have so little time with each other, and so rarely, that to dive headfirst into such topics feels like plunging into cold water and so you don't do it.
My parents organised a family trip to South Australia for four days, which was amazing. The highlight was definitely Kangaroo Island, which is like a huge wild menagerie of all different sorts of animals. Growing up in Australia I stopped seeing the novelty of kangaroos or koalas a long time ago, but seeing them just casually doing their thing in the wild really brought back some excitement to the tired stereotypes in my head. It also helps that Kangaroo Island is stupendously beautiful, with wild jagged coastal cliffs, pristine beaches, iconic mallee scrub, green meadows, and random sand dunes in the middle of nowhere. The other places we visited on the trip were the Barossa Valley for some wine tasting, and a tiny bit of Adelaide (unfortunately, we didn't get to walk around and explore very much).
Work
Work has been busy, have been staying past 7 most nights (although the hours that Jon puts in make me feel lazy). Some interesting news from this week is that I will have someone reporting directly to me from next week onwards. It'll be a challenge juggling that with my own work, but I guess it's a good opportunity to figure out whether I like the whole management track or not.
Oot and aboot
There are several travel plans in the works: going to New York for a few days next week, visiting Sam in Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) a week or two after that, and Thanksgiving in Whistler. By all accounts the snow is bucketing down in the mountains, so it's likely we will have some fully sick pow, bro.
Music
Have been to some decent shows recently: Fujiya and Miyagi last week (pretty good), Great Lake Swimmers (even better), Patrick Wolf (outstanding). I also brought back the 2 latest Cat Empire albums from Australia, Cities (more of an experimental album) and So Many Nights (a mainstream release). The former is outstanding and hard to stop listening to on repeat; the latter was pretty disappointing, unfortunately. New album means touring though, so hopefully they will make it to Sea'le.
Actor Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood's answer to Tom Cruise, has recently come under fire for promoting Fair and Handsome, a skin-lightening cream targeted at men and sold in India and Indian shops around the world (the ad is viewable on Youtube here and speaks for itself). The ads for Fair and Lovely, the original cream for women from which F&H was spun off, aren't much better. Here's a particularly horrible one I found in English (with equally cringe-worthy runners up viewable in the related videos at the end):
The obsession with fairness is fed from all directions. Bollywood actors and actresses, the accepted benchmark for beauty, are invariably light-skinned (and don't tell me Bipasha Basu is "dark"). I can probably count on one hand the number of matrimonial ads I've seen that don't contain the word "fair", either to make the spouse-seeker seem more attractive or to specify what kind of husband or wife they're looking for.
I find it amazing that in this day and age, while we all boast happily about how modern and progressive India is, attitudes of this kind are still so widespread. And it's not just India - skin lightening treatments are big business everywhere from China to the Caribbean. I'm not sure if it's some prolonged post-colonial hangover or if it reaches back even farther than that.
Every culture has its own yardsticks of beauty, whether it's complexion or body shape or foot size, and most of us are hard pressed to measure up to our society's ideal of "beautiful". That exclusivity is one reason why beauty is so ardently worshipped. But in a world that's come leaps and bounds in recent decades in matters of race, measuring someone's beauty and worth by their skin colour seems unacceptable to me.
It's nice being back in Sydney. The last few days have been very relaxed, I've been bumming at home, going for walks with my mum, eating good food, not much else.
Some observations:
- The weather is still pretty cold right now despite it being late September. After being away for a year my brain somehow managed to reinvent Sydney as an idyllic place that is hot and sunny all year round. However the hoodie I brought from Seattle *just in case* has been getting a decent workout.
- When I got home my mum and grandma let me write a list of all the home-cooked food I want them to make, and they're now scheduling something for each day I'm home for dinner. Oh, this is the life. Going back to my wonderful (ahem) pasta and stir fries 5 days a week is going to be hard, hard, hard. Also in danger with all this yummy food promised at home is my other aim of hitting up all my favourite Sydney food haunts.
- I've been drinking Easyway every day, it's been great. Seems like their menu has really been trimmed down since I was at uni though. What happened to all the weird and wacky pearl teas I used to try with trepidation down at Market City? Even Gossip in Seattle seems to have a wider selection than Easyway now.
- I am working remotely for a week while I'm here since I couldn't get a whole two weeks off. The RAS is pretty responsive, so it's reasonably productive. I just have to stop myself from wandering into the kitchen and staring/sniffing longingly at whatever my grandma happens to be cooking at that moment.
- I have been staying up at odd hours watching the 20/20 cricket world cup on TV, it's been fun! I am a little nonplussed at ostentatiousness of the whole extravaganza - call me a purist but I still need more convincing that cheerleaders and fireworks belong on a cricket field. But the shorter format is definitely more compelling than one-day cricket though, which still seems like too much of a time investment for the casual spectator. Thrilling stuff.
- Heading to South Australia with the family later this week for the long weekend, I am looking forward to that, especially seeing Kangaroo Island and Adelaide Oval.
My friend Punit managed to get himself in the newspaper: http://freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070918/BUSINESS01/70918108
This may be my biggest claim to fame since going to the same high school as Nikki Webster.
Going to the New Pornographers concert on Friday reminded me how much I love songs that build up slowly to a climax. Here are my favourite build up songs:
- Bleeding Heart Show - New Pornographers (also probably in my top ten favourite songs of all time)
- Wine Song - Cat Empire
- Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
- The Mariner's Revenge Song - The Decemberists (this song is unusual in that it's the lyrics that create the climax, rather than the music. Colin Meloy is the most creative, articulate lyricist I have heard)
- Kajra Re - from Bunty Aur Babli
Honourable mentions:
- Turn and Run - Neil Finn
- Come Downstairs and Say Hello - Guster
- I Am John - Loney Dear
- Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen
- John Allen Smith Sails - Okkervil River
Those are the ones that came to mind - I'm sure there's a bunch of good ones I've missed.
I have never been this sick before and it is scary. I have a throat infection and it's really painful to swallow. When I do get something down my body mainly rejects it. There have been more days this week that I've hurled up all my food than days I've kept it down. I've lost 7 pounds in the last 6 days.
And I've been stuck indoors for so many days. It's beautiful outside, the last, precious, precious days of summer, I WANT TO GET OUT...
I was meant to be camping this weekend. We were going to hike out to the meadows on the west side of Mount Rainier and sit amongst the flowers and watch the alpenglow on the glaciers at sunset.
I am really behind at work. I already have a ton of things on my plate, now I'm another week behind from being sick, and I only have a few days to make up the difference before I go on vacation.
That said, wonderful generous acts have come out of this. People have worked from home so they can take care of me and be at my beck and call and spend thirty patient minutes coaxing me to finish a bowl of soup. And then tell me not to thank them.
I wonder about people who get sick who don't have what I have. Lonely people with no friends or family to care for them. Single mothers who still need to send their kids off to school every day and pay the bills. Sweatshop workers who'll get fired if they miss a day. And I think wow. This miserable burping retching bag of flesh really is a lucky bird.
I've never had much of an appreciation for poetry. Ok - let me be perfectly honest - I've always considered it as the height of self-indulgent emo. When forced to read it at school I always resisted through ruthless reductionism: breaking down the whole, wrenching the meaning and rhetorical device out of every syllable, memorising it for my exam and reducing it to just another thing on the checklist to rote learn. I can name a dozen books that have changed my life, but not a single poem. Maybe Tagore managed to raise a few hairs on the back of my neck, but that's about the extent of my engagement with verse.
Today I happened to attend a poetry slam at Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual music and arts festival. The format is very simple - it's a competition where the poets come on stage and recite their work, and pre-selected members of the audience judge their performances based on delivery and content. In concept it sounds a little too spelling bee, but the result is really amazing. For the first time in my life, I actually truly appreciated and enjoyed poetry.
The poets on stage ranged from a forty-year-old woman from Seattle, to a ragtag group of lefty uni students from Berkeley, to a bunch of underprivileged high school kids. They yelled, they whispered, they punched the air, they grinned knowingly, reciting on everything from Blackbeard the pirate to September 11 to childhood abuse to the art of seducing attractive hippies at Pike Place Market. Whatever the subject, the poetry came straight from the heart, and hearing it from the mouth of the poet was a transcendental experience. It brought all that wordsmithery, which never jumped off the page for me, to life.
I never thought I'd hear myself say the words "we should go to more poetry readings". But that was just incredible.
A few weekends ago, I did the classic High Divide hike in the Olympic range, a few hours west of Seattle. My excuse for taking this long to get this entry up is that I got a new laptop with Windows Vista, and the Vox bulk uploader only works with XP, and damned if I was going to bother uploading photos three at a time from the web interface. Anyway. It took a few weeks for me to remember that one of my work computers still has XP, so I uploaded them from there. So that's my story.
Back to the point: I actually attempted this hike once last year. That time, I ended up in hospital with a doctor scraping half the Olympic peninsula out of my knee. This was more indicative of my terrible foot-eye coordination than to the demanding nature of the hike, although it is one of the tougher hikes on the peninsula. I vowed to come back this year however, and did so with a trusty gang of friends. This time I amazingly made it through the two days without even tripping over my own feet once - possibly some sort of record.
High Divide is meant to be all about the views. The 3000 foot elevation gain gives you amazing vistas of the Olympic mountains, snow-capped still even in summer. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire weekend and our whole journey was wrapped in thick fog. We looked out off cliff faces only to see a big soup of grey. It was a testament to the magic of the place that it was still an incredibly beautiful hike. We walked through lush, ancient rainforest, green meadows, high barren alpine ridges and past tranquil lakes. And fog is always good for one thing: black and white photography. Hence, in this post I'm going to let my pictures do the talking: a photo-essay, of sorts.
Rainforest
The forests of the Olympic peninsula are among the oldest on the planet. Every inch of these woods are teeming with life, from the tallest hemlock to the tiniest little 'shroom.
Meadow
The climb to the high country runs through impossibly green alpine meadows full of flowers and gurgling brooks. I kept breaking into "The hills are alive with the sound of music..."
Wildlife
My first ever bear sighting in the wild! We spent a few minutes watching this guy pottering around the meadow, and our day was made.
Camping
We set up camp on a sheltered hill by Heart Lake. That silhouetted photo is of Sean doing his best hungry bear impersonation. There are so many bears out and about in the park that campers have to hang their food on bear wires 12 feet off the ground. Or hungry bears will smell your food and try to join you for an in-tent picnic.
Morning
We had to pack up in the morning in rain and fog. It didn't look like it was going to clear up or blow away very soon, also the tent was turning into a swimming pool, so we just decided to set off. Better out than in.
Raindrops
I got some good raindrop shots.
B/W
And some good dramatic black and whites.
High country
Despite the lack of views, the high country was still undeniably majestic, and still had some snow-covered patches even though it was late summer.
Llamas
We met a guy leading llamas up the mountain.
Ending
It was good to rest our tired feet at the end (sprinkled with some feats of strength, of course).
Civilisation
The sun came out just as we hit Port Angeles. We consoled ourselves with a good meal at the Cornerhouse, best diner in town.
