plus ça change

Half-way around the world, another country embraces change. Upstairs at my place, things are more the same than ever.

The upstairs rooms are still in a state. I've been meaning to tidy up the bathrooms, but I got gastro a couple of weeks ago and I didn't feel like doing much for a few days. That set everything else back, so I'm only just getting back to it now. Admittedly, I've only got a few odd jobs left to do before I set upon my own bedroom, but getting back to them has been a bit of a struggle.

My parents and my brother are coming down for Christmas and New Year and not much else. They're only getting here the day before Christmas itself (so I'll miss Dad's birthday), and they're only here for a few days after New Year. Now that I've got plenty of places to put them up, that's not going to be an issue. Plus, I won't have many days to fill up with things to do. Still, I only get to see them in person once a year, an experience sadly not available on Skype.

I invited a few friends and relatives out to celebrate my birthday - not on my birthday, because nobody could go, but still, the celebration's the thing. I wanted to bring together people from different circles but that I knew would get along, so I invited them all out for dinner at one of the local restaurants. It all went off pretty well. Not everyone could turn up, including my lady friend who isn't my girlfriend; she did drunk-dial me to invite me out afterwards, though.

Since someone has already asked, I should mention that this time was much easier and much less awkward than two weeks prior. Sure, she got nearly as drunk and I was even more sober, but the pressure came off: the expectations were much more subdued, and having learnt what she gets like, I understand a bit better how I should treat her. Even the weird things drunk people say - which might be insightful unspoken truths, or which might be random crap - don't affect me as much any more. (Actually, they affect me a lot more than I care to admit, but I'm getting more graceful about it.)

Actually, on that note, I did meet someone a week ago. I was at a presentation about the limits to economic growth, organised by Economic Reform Australia. It was an excellent discussion - the presenter just about wore himself out with his own enthusiasm, and everyone seemed to hang on his every word. I hung around afterwards to join in the afterglow, and in the process, I met a young lady who had come from China to do her PhD in environmental accounting. We got to talking about climate change and peak oil - normally a good way to end conversations with the uninitiated, but not in this case. It was actually something of a novelty for me to talk to someone both intellectual and open-minded about the subject: most of the people I know either worry themselves sick about peak oil or refuse to acknowledge the problems in any way. I've sent her a couple of emails on the subject, so she's got plenty of homework to do, but I can't help but wonder if she'll get back to me. I mean, I'm happy enough to network for now, but I wonder if she'd like to continue the conversation over a coffee. Oh well, we'll see.

* * * * * *

The thing that's really bothering me at the moment is work. Things are going from the sublime to the ridiculous, and I'm still bored out of my mind. However, it has taken a turn for the worse in the past week or two.

We are working on a task that has turned sour before it has even started. I suspect my boss doesn't know what we're doing either and is just making it up as he goes along. This wouldn't worry me, normally, but not only is he holding me up by our not knowing, but he's working hard to pretend both that we do and that I can't see through it. Every time we talk about what's happening, I learn something fundamental about the project that I should have been told weeks ago, certainly before we started submitting documents about it.

I spent some time writing my boss an email, in which I collated the whole array of things I hadn't been told in a timely fashion, or hadn't been told at all, that have gotten this project on the wrong foot so early. The email turned pretty nasty pretty quickly, though, and I wasn't sure it wouldn't do more harm than good to send it. Normally, I prefer to write something a bit more positive and a lot more constructive, even if the nasty version says things that really need to be said. I don't know whether I can hold back this time. Maybe my patient really is at an end.

For all the time I've had wasted by having nothing to do at work, you'd think I'd be welcoming this with open arms. However, that's not the point. I'm sick and tired of being treated like a mushroom in this job. I've been so patient with him, and I've been consistently let down. This has to change now. The question remains: even if this will make things better for me, do I have the guts to do it?

"welcome to my favourites"

Well, I've had a pretty full-on couple of weeks. It's been a real rollercoaster ride: the highs have been really high and the lows have been major catastrophes. I'm glad things are starting to calm down now.

Alright, where do I start?

* * * * * *

When my friend Janet visited a couple of weekends ago, we talked a little bit about fixing up one of the rooms at home. The room at the top of the stairs was basically a return desk, with random junk underneath and random cleaning products on top. (Kind of an ironic combination, now that I think about it.) Janet and I talked about clearing that room and she suggested turning it into a lounge room of some sort.

The first thing to do was to find a cupboard to put all the junk in. I found a pantry that doesn't quite fit in the room properly, but I've since had that moved into the spare bedroom and I'm slowly filling it up. The empty landing has been filled with a sofa bed and a coffee table - so I've now lost my Ikea virginity - and I've moved the TV, the Wii and a DVD player out there as well. It's all starting to take shape.

In something of a strange coincidence, just as I'd finished clearing the room, we got a knock on the front door from an art student who had some paintings to show off. He and I got to talking and I showed him the room that I was renovating. I ended up buying two paintings of Mediterranean landscapes, and he's since been back to frame them. The room itself is white walls with black furniture, but the paintings give the room a bit of colour. I've got a few more ideas about that, but I've got to move on to the spare bedroom now and put things away.

Eventually, I'll get back to my own room. It used to be in quite a state, but now it's not only in a state but also looking a bit bare without the TV.

* * * * * *

My birthday has just come and gone. I've just turned 29 for the third time. :)

Saturday had all the makings of a terribly depressing birthday. A friend of a friend wants to sell a bicycle, and I took it for a ride in the morning, but I'm still not sure about buying it. I'm going to take it to work on Wednesday (and hopefully on Thursday as well), which is really what I want a new bike for. I did a bit of shopping, but save for a few details for my new lounge room, I didn't really buy anything.

I'd been at great pains all day to find someone to celebrate my birthday with; pretty much everyone I know was already doing something. My family back home called me on Skype, and when that was done, it was nearly 20:00 and I still had nothing fun to do and no company to do it with. I gave up and headed down to the pub.

As pubs go, the Mawson Lakes Hotel is pretty upmarket. Aside the poker machines at one end and the sports bar at the other, it's a pretty classy establishment. I've gone there to dine many times, but I've not been there much for a drink. For my birthday, I decided to to both, treating myself to a steak and a glass of shiraz, and then staying on for a beer or two.

It worked out okay as well. I just wanted to buy a few people a few drinks, and although it took a while for people to figure out that I was just celebrating my birthday by throwing money around in exchange for alcohol, we all understood each other in the end. In fact, I even got a few free pints out of it myself. When the sports bar shut, those of us who were left moved to the far classier end of the bar, where a wedding party had moved in. It was nearly 02:00 the next morning when things quieted down.

When I got up the next morning, reading the news and checking my email as I often do over breakfast, I got a whole slew of emails from YouTube. A couple of weeks ago, I put up a clip from Newstopia to commemorate its return for a third season. It turned out that a couple of blogs in the USA and Canada had picked it up, and thousands of people had clicked through and watched it. I've had a few dozen comments in the last two days, and several people were so impressed that they subscribed to my channel on the spot. About 150 have rated it, and about as many again have added it to their favourites. As I write this, it's one of the top 50 videos in Australia, and I'm currently one of the hundred most popular Australian directors on YouTube. I love surprises, sure, but this really came out of the blue. I've got a few more videos to work on, and if anything's going to get me to make the time to do them, that might just be it.

The only problem was that I didn't end up going for a bike ride that I'd planned to do that afternoon. It was a bit hot and stuffy that day, and I was valiantly fighting off a headache. This is what happens when I don't drink enough water - though I don't wonder whether the big night before had anything to do with it, of course.

* * * * * *

I've written a fair bit over the past few months, albeit rather obtusely, about finally getting into a relationship again, and I've got good news and bad news on that front.

The young lady in question works near where I work, and over the past six months or so, we've sort of gotten to chatting a bit over the counter. (She can't stop to chat very much while she's at work, so I've had to learn how to keep my conversations under a minute.) She's been very nice to me, but we haven't really had a chance to get to know each other. Eventually, I asked her out for a cup of coffee, and we've caught up on occasion after work, but that was about it.

On the long weekend, she and some other relatives were taking a cousin out for his 18th birthday, and she invited me to come along. It's a good sign for me that on the two occasions I've seen her socially, I've met relatives on either side of her family. We all headed off in search of drinking and dancing, and although she and I got separated from the rest of the group, there are plenty of places to party in the city. Things were going really well - for a while.

As we moved from one club to the next, it occurred to me that, as it is so often wont to do, the alcohol was starting to push things out of control. I'd driven into the city and had been drinking lots of water, so that I could sober up fast when it was time to leave. As it happened, I needed to be sober far more urgently than I'd expected. I won't go into the gory details in such a public forum as this: suffice to say that nothing really happened, but largely because of my intervention. I was going to take her home to make sure she was all right - and nothing more, before you ask - but she redirected me to a friend's place and I dropped her off there.

I was out and about the next day, but I thought I'd drop in to see how she was doing, since it wasn't far out of the way. It turned out that the place I dropped her was actually - gasp! - her boyfriend's place. He didn't know anything about me, and I didn't know anything about him, so it was all a bit delicate. I didn't talk much, but I had to get out of there before anyone made an even bigger fool out of me.

I was pretty upset that day. I'd had such a good night, and I'd had my hopes built up so much, that it was devastating to have them all crash down in such awkward circumstances. I've spoken privately to choice members of my family and friends, and that calmed me down a lot. I needed a few days to process things, and to take my mind off it, before I talked to her again.

When I called her up on Tuesday, she and I were able to talk frankly about what had happened. She didn't want to be more than friends and apologised if that hadn't been clearer earlier. In return, although I had had the wrong idea about us (particuarly on the night), I now know that she's already attached to someone else, and I needed to assure them both that I'm not going to be any threat to their relationship whatsoever. In that sense, as my brother had pointed out to me, the whole thing may have been a lucky escape; I might have gone on a lot longer, hoping falsely and harbouring that wrong idea.

It was refreshing to be able to talk about such grave misunderstandings as mature adults. I haven't always been lucky enough to have that around me - as anyone who has known me long enough to remember either the last job I had or the last relationship I was in will attest. Furthermore, where relationships are concerned, stealing someone else's partner is completely out of the question for me: I've been on the receiving end of that myself, and I wouldn't wish it upon anyone else. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about trusting her, but then again, I wasn't sure how much she'd want to trust me either. Our little chat last week has all but convinced me entirely that that won't be an issue for us.

The bottom line is pretty simple. The good news is that we still want to be friends and still think we can make it happen. The bad news is that I still don't have a girlfriend. That said, I've still got plenty of chips left on the stack, and I'm not afraid to ante up and start playing all over again.

* * * * * *

It's weird. In net terms, I don't feel as though I've gained a lot in these past few weeks. Yet, I can't help but feel a sense of achievement, that things have changed now and changed for the better. There are still many things to be done, but it's been a long time since I've wanted to do them with this level of vigour.

I am tired but overstimulated. When this passes, I will just be able to take everything in and appreciate the way it has become. I can hope.

Video: Newstopia explains the Reserve Bank

At the start of the year, I cut together a sketch from Newstopia about the Reserve Bank of Australia. With the show back on TV for a third season, I've finally put the video I made on YouTube.

I know I don't own the copyright to this, but there are plenty of other Newstopia clips out there, and SBS doesn't seem to mind. (Personally, I think they need all the publicity they can get for this show - but that's not to say they don't deserve it.)

I've gotten a pretty good response to this already, especially since a couple of liberal blogs picked it up. It's also been copied already, but if it wasn't mine to begin with, I don't think I'll kick up too much of a fuss.

giving is receiving

Not much is happening at the moment. I had hoped to be busy enough to appreciate the calm, but really, I'm itching to disturb it.

I was paid a visit last weekend by an old friend from Townsville. Janet and I have only kept in touch sporadically over the past couple of years, but she came down for a wedding and stayed a few nights here. I was fighting off a generic lurgi from two different directions, so I wasn't ideal company, but made a good time of it. The Crocs lost, sadly, but we took a bus trip up to the Barossa Valley and spent most of the Monday shopping. Most of this I've done before, but I've never spent quite so much time with a $185 bottle of Wolf Blass Platinum Shiraz; it cost me a tenner just to taste it, but it was superb, worth every cent.

Work is about the same. I've been on-site on and off for the past two weeks, so I have had at least some proper work to do, even if it's not really mine. Now that I'm officially on standby - a status change that, in itself, took nearly three months - I'm a bit worried about turning into a bit of a dogsbody, getting dragged in to do the dirty work on everyone's little pet projects that they never get time to do. I almost want someone to tell me that we really have run out of things for me to do, so that I'd know that they'd stopped kidding themselves. Actually, I wonder if someone is going to tell me something about anything; the jobs I've been lined up for keep falling through one by one, which is as much a curse as a blessing.

Things aren't getting any easier on the relationship front, either. I had hoped to set up my actual common-or-garden date for last night, but my lady friend hardly had time even to tell me how busy she already was that night. I feel that she's done a lot more favours for me than I've been able to return so far, and I'm trying hard not to be impatient about when I'll be able to restore the balance.

We're even coming up to another special occasion that won't go exactly as planned. My birthday is only two weeks away, and as usual, not only do I not know what I want, but the only things I can think of are too big and too expensive for other people to buy them for me, and I'm too fussy to let them do it anyway. Try this combination out some day: it's a sure-fire way of not getting the presents you want. (Not that I don't appreciate people trying, of course - and, unlike some of my friends, I do like a pleasant surprise.)

That said, as presents go, if there's nothing you want, maybe there's something you need. Trouble is, what I need more than anything now is to give. I've even thought of calling my birthday off this year and using that time to do something for someone else. I've even got a few ideas already about who I can serve and what they might like. Maybe that's was missing. The serving, that is, not the other people.

Crash

Last night, I watched a film called Crash, which you may remember as the dark horse that pipped Brokeback Mountain for the Academy Award for Best Picture a couple of years ago. I'm not going to get into the controversy of the Oscar nod, particularly because I haven't even seen Brokeback Mountain to comment on it. Crash, however, despite its low budget, is something special: it's a powerful and emotional piece of cinematic storytelling. I'm almost ashamed to have only just found it on sale for ten bucks; it deserves much better.

The movie deals a lot with one's sense of faith in other people. There's a lot of segregation in the film - among races, among classes, among professions - but overall, it's more about people coming together than it is about separating them. The drama comes from the trying coincidences that bring these people together and the decisions that they make when faced with these problems. From a philosophical standpoint, it's fascinating.

I'm faced with a few moral dilemmas myself at the moment, and I'm having a great deal of difficulty deciding on the right things to do. More to the point, I keep wondering whether even any one of these dilemmas might, dramatically and at short notice, change something important in my life. Here are a few examples.

* * * * * *

My housemate and landlord has shuffled some money around, and he's in the market for a photovoltaic installation for the house. He hasn't spoken too much to me about the details; I think he wants to get it started, taking advantage of the government rebates on solar electricity in the process, and do what is obviously the right thing. It seems pretty straightforward.

Now, you'd think that a greenie such as myself would support such a plan. Yet, I don't know whether I do; nay, I don't even know that it's not a really stupid idea of which I want no part whatsoever. How can this be? How can it not be as simple as that?

There is a lot to like about this house, but from the perspective of long-term environmental sustainability, there's a lot to hate as well. Like most houses in the suburb, it has paper-thin walls and no insulation, thanks to the blasé assumption that all interior climate can be solved with a big enough air conditioner. Furthermore, the main living areas have those horrible recessed halogen downlights. Although pitched as low-voltage, they consume enormous amounts of electricity, they each have a transformer that consumes even more electricity, and, according to an uncle of mine who is himself an electrician, they're a fire risk.

If that weren't bad enough, the house is full of electronic gadgets that are continuously either left on or left in standby mode. In fact, my housemate's hi-fi cabinet - which doesn't contain a television or a computer - consumes more electricity on standby than every appliance I own combined. I can only guess what it's like in parts of the house I haven't measured.

For me, the dilemma is that for all of the electricity that his proposed PV installation would provide, he could save far more energy just with a few minor adjustments here and there. The thousands of dollars he would be spending on solar power would be better spent on replacement downlights, ceiling insulation and canopies for the north-facing windows. If that in and of itself doesn't cover the difference in electricity use, the simple habit of turning appliances off at the mains when they're not being used - or getting timers for those power points that are hard to reach - would put him over the top. To look at the problem in reverse, he'll be spending money on electricity he either doesn't even use or doesn't have to have.

Of course, not everyone sees these problems the way I do, and that means I've got to be very careful how I explain it. Certainly, my way would be a far better investment of his time and money, since, importantly, it might actually have a chance of changing his way of thinking about energy use. (Besides, were he really so keen on Mother Earth, he'd be getting rid of that surrogate penis he drives everywhere.) It's really the change in mentality that's required here.

I'm not against him investing in solar power - I do believe it's a worthwhile investment - but I want him to know what he's getting himself into. I want him to be able to quantify what he's spending his time and money on. Perhaps the biggest questions, and the ones I'd ask first, are why he's doing this and how much of a difference he thinks it will make.

That said, I hope he's just as well prepared for my answers. Ideally, I would want to test him, to set him some homework, and make sure he knows what he's doing. On the other hand, if he can't understand that he might just be wasting his time, he's got no chance of understanding how he'll be wasting mine. I'm used to the idea of people not necessarily appreciating my help, but perhaps he is not.

* * * * * *

I'm in something of an odd spot at work as well, and have been for longer than I'm comfortable to admit. Anyway, here goes.

The project I'm doing at work is drawing to a close. Well, apparently, it is, anyway. I pretty much finished everything I needed to do at the end of June, and I've been figuratively twiddling my thumbs ever since. During this time, I haven't been game to take the bus or the bike to work, just in case I get dragged up to the clients' site at short notice. However, I have started taking my Mac to work, to pass the time editing movies rather than playing cards.

In the meantime, my betters have been talking to me about the sorts of projects that I might be working on next time. Every upcoming project seems to be in a different city, so I'm less worried about the work itself than I am about where I'm going to be and how I'm going to get there. Maybe I'll still be here; maybe I'll be here sometimes and flying back and forth to Canberra; maybe I'll have to move temporarily. I just don't know yet.

None of this is really on my mind while I'm at work, though. I'm far more interested to know how I can get rid of the project I've got now. Even after the weeks at the start of the project that were essentially wasted arguing about what we could and couldn't do with the resources we had, I'm convinced that I finished everything I needed to do in the last week of June. It's now September and I've barely done a week's work in that time. I'm getting the impression that this project is never going to end, and it's little consolation that my supervisor is nearly as frustrated about it as I am.

It's a depressing situation to be in, but I wonder whether it wouldn't be worse to say something. At the moment, it's just embarrassing to me; if I speak out, it will be embarrassing to me, to my supervisor, and probably to his supervisor as well. It doesn't seem like that long ago that I embarrassed my bosses in my previous job by speaking frankly about their obvious incompetence. Unsurprisingly, they were very defensive about it and very vindictive towards me, and things ended very badly as a result. It doesn't help when you are dealing with people whose self-image of being problem-solvers is little more than a crude disguise.

Although this isn't exactly the same situation, I don't really want to risk causing the same problems. That being said, I don't know what else to do about it. As it is, I don't know how much longer I can keep coming to work, knowing that every day is going to be a little bit worse than the one before. I should, by rights, speak out and at least stick up for myself. The problem is how to point out a grave problem delicately to someone who might not react in the most gracious fashion - which may have more of a detrimental effect than I was hoping for, and not just on me.

* * * * * *

Two months ago, I wrote in this blog that it was time to find a young woman to bring into my life again. I've been pretty coy about this, but only because this has taken a bit longer than I'd hoped. You know that patience is a virtue, because being patient is really hard.

Well, there is a young woman in the picture now. I'd talked to her a few times where she worked, and she was always really nice to me, as fleeting as our conversations were. Shortly after I wrote about wanting someone special in my life again, I summoned up the courage to ask her out - and although she didn't know when she'd have time to do it, she said yes. We've slotted in some short conversations after work, but even these have been few and far between. It's tricky to talk to her at work, even if it's only to ask whether she can hang around for a chat afterwards. (The last time I talked to her at work, I hung around a bit too long and I think I might have gotten her into trouble with her boss. Actually, I think I might have gotten myself into trouble with her boss as well.)

What I'd been hoping for was a chance for us just to sit down and get to know each other a bit better, which is something on which I put a lot of value. That said, it might also have been a chance for her to chat with me and not to have somewhere else to go in a hurry straight afterwards. It was time to ask her on a proper date. I would have done it, too - had she not gotten in first.

She was taking her mother out bowling on Friday night, along with a few other relatives, just for a bit of fun. When I saw her on Thursday, she asked me if I wanted to come along. My date idea would have to wait for another time, but I was thinking more about trying not to be overcome with how flattered I was to be invited.

It's hard to see any of this as a bad thing. Okay, so she couldn't get a booking at the first bowling alley she tried, but she found another one and booked a lane there. Everything else on the night went off without a hitch. Bowling was fun, even with the bumpers out for those of us who had never bowled before. Better, though, I got to meet some of her family, who were all quite warm to me, and I hope I came across the same way. Everyone had a good time.

I'm the first to admit that things haven't progressed as quickly as I'd hoped with this girl and that I don't know her very well yet. Still, I like what I've found out so far, and I'm trying to be patient with it, waiting for a chance to learn more. She's a fairly straight talker, and even being a few years younger than me, she seems to have a strong sense of responsibility, both for herself and for others. (Having spent six years working among people who have neither of these qualities, you can see how much I'd appreciate someone who exhibits both.) As if the way she carries herself weren't attractive enough, she made the bold gesture of inviting me out to family get-together. Something must be going right. Indeed, nothing much seems to have gone wrong yet.

So... what's the problem? What's on my mind? What am I afraid of?

As I mentioned earlier, things are a bit up-in-the-air at work. The thing I'm most worried about is the idea that I might have to leave town at short notice and that I might not be back for many months. I'm worried about getting so close that I might hurt her if I have to be away. How I might feel is a worry as well, of course, but I'm more worried about how she might feel if things end before they really start. I don't really know what to do.

I was talking to my best friend back home about this. My instinctive response is to tell her what's happening at work and how something interstate might just pop up. My friend wasn't so sure it was the right time to tell her: there's a chance that it might scare her off, and there's a chance that this might be an "issue" that scares her off. I don't know whether any of this will happen yet, but at this early stage, talking about what might ruin things might send the wrong message, as though I was looking for a way to avoid her, or as though I didn't care whether it hurt her or not. As I put it, I'm concerned that something might happen with work before something happens with her, and I'm concerned that something will happen with her and then I'll get sent away for work.

One thing I love about this job is the breadth of opportunity - that if I stay on long enough, I might get to work all over the world in all sorts of different areas. (That's also helping me be patient with the project I've got that I don't seem to be able to get rid of.) That said, it might just be my undoing as well. It all seems a bit delicate at the moment.

I'm pretty sure I like this girl, and I'm pretty sure that she likes me - and yet, somehow, this isn't entirely a good thing. It's difficult enough for her to make time for me, since we rarely see each other outside of her work, but this is a minor hurdle by comparison. This is a complication that I don't need, and one that I don't want, but also one I don't want to give up on.

* * * * * *

Crash opens with a voiceover from "Detective Graham Waters" (Don Cheadle), who laments that in the city, paradoxically, people are so close together, and yet so isolated from each other, that it's only the most dramatic aspects of society that people notice. Everything has to be in black and white. It's either good or it's evil. It's either perfect or it's nothing.

I can see this happening among other people, but I'm not sure it's true of me. I'm proud of how flexible and tolerant I can be and how much of life's subtlety I can appreciate. As I'm finishing this off at work, my boss's boss has stuck his head through the door. I hardly even notice that he's seen me doing something that doesn't even look work-related. He says he hasn't heard about the Perth job: we may not have won the tender, but then again, the whole thing might just be running late. Another story with two sides, and neither of them is easy to explain.

Suddenly, I'm transported into the movie again. I'm sitting here typing all alone, still surrounded by people who I don't know whether I can trust. I don't know how they see themselves, nor how they see themselves tested every day. All I have is myself. The test is one set for my own faith that other people will do the right thing for the right reasons. I've failed this test before, but I'll do better this time. I have to.