Sea Green

Ephemera etc.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Tracing Toorak

I walked around Toorak today. It’s not where I live, or even usually visit, it’s just where I was staying these past few days, on a trip to Melbourne for a course. I donned my yoga pants and walking shoes, some raggedy yesterday t-shirt, and gave myself nearly an hour to walk and look. I saw lots of churches, jeepers that suburb has a few, a saintly school, with well groomed children being dropped off, some so tiny it seemed criminal to abandon them with strangers in such an institutional setting, lost as they were in their large blazers and stuffy shirt. I saw a row of gum trees with thick clear plastic tree guards to stop possums from going up there to roost. I thought about this, about being a gum tree nigh on 100 years old perhaps, and missing the feeling of possums climbing over you, the familiar tickle or trace of life up your limbs, the trees rendered empty for the aesthetic preferences of the people living on the ground who have little to do with the workings of trees.

I saw an abandoned sock, brown and striped and crumpled on the foot path. I saw a girl walking her dog, in what I at first thought were sheer leg ins with knee high socks over the top until I got closer and saw that this was some custom built exercise pant with sheer mesh around the backs of the knees and zippers and angled panels. Oooh, fancy. I revised her in my mind, from disaffected teen walking family dog in street wear to serious older lady with training goals. All because of her pants.

After my walk my mind was very alive with ideas, lots of quirky things I thought I would write about. Now, at the end of the day I can barely remember what they were, that seemed so rich and boundless.

Keeping your distance

This girl I met is doing her thesis on long distance relationships and the use of technology to maintain successful relationships. Or something like that. She tells me that there’s lots of research been done, lots written on how frequently and for what duration people use technology to connect, but that her research will be focused on what people disclose, and the degree of intimacy gained in the interactions mediated by technology. I am somewhat fascinated by this, I feel like maybe somewhere out there is a journal article that will tell me exactly how many minutes long my phone calls should be when distance separates me from a lover, to make sure the wheels don’t fall off, and that our relationship stays deep and strong and connected.

This is relevant to me because I’ve been in a long distance relationship that ‘didn’t work’. This is to say the relationship tumbled apart and it happened in the long distance phase. We weren’t always long distance, although towards the end it like the moon and back. Unchartable distances, unpassable distances, different space time continuum type distances. We probably didn’t see each other often enough, or call often enough. We probably didn’t use the calls for what you should. I imagine that long distance couples who plan to see each other every second or third or even fourth weekend, where the distance and budget can stretch to this, do better than those who see each other only every couple of months.

I imagine that those who speak daily about the details of daily life, cheerfully, longingly but not reproachfully do well. I imagine those who are distant for a shared and tangible reason that both understand and accept, and even better for a defined period of time with an end point in sight, do better than those who are creepingly unsure about why they are apart, or for whose benefit they are apart, or when the apartness will be resolved and the distance brought hurling together, fast motion style, their separate points in space collided.

There is a certain familiar grief around separation in romantic relationships. Think every film with sad goodbyes at train stations, our collective thoughts of war and its sweethearts, lockets and folded damp paper letters, think of modern service people, the tours of duty which may not involve war like the old movies but still involves separation, astronauts hurtled out into black space in their tin rockets, or prison stays with strained visits between scratched plexiglass and lonely nights in empty cells without family, and even those shorter separations, the business trip, the week away to see family, the other commitment, elsewhere, that you do privately beyond the commitment to your relationship.

I am interested now in the notion of long distance relationships because I think I’m in one. Probably it’s not as dramatic as any of the more iconic types. This is only the distance of a few suburbs; with this distance compounded by living in different daily time zones. Me, a nine to five office desk bound typey type, he a night flighty hospitality who. My bedtime is his peak hour. My morning is his sleep time. Like some nocturnal marsupial blinking wide eyes at the bright, and me some languid large lizard who slows to a stop in the dark, and warms up in the sun to be positively active by mid day. We see each other every weekend, so we have not turned into some strange memory, some painful long separated ediface of a couple. Nor have we been thrown into this separate mode recently, we met like this, we have built a relationship on these brief overlaps, these thin areas around the edge where our habit and habitat overlap is where we have become friends. As such the distance is not strange, there is no other better time that we pine for. This is a blessing. There is some grace in not having an idealised past without the tyranny of distance to return to.

I wish there was some formula, some paper that had reviewed 100 lives like ours, and could tell me how intimate to be on the phone, how long to speak for, but I doubt there is. I do know from my own experience that the smallest of things matter when you are not close by. A 5 minute call can feel luxurious when you are used to 1 minute ‘can I call you later I’m just with customers?’. A text message wishing you a good night’s sleep or luck for a meeting brings this person to life, brings them into your life firmly and positions them as a solid and steadfast element at these important moments at days start and end when we look new on our lives and loves and take stock. This positioning as an ally is important.

And while little sweetnesses are easy to send by phone other things are less easy. When a misunderstanding or a scheduling mishap happens, phones are hollow and brittle medium for expressing dissatisfaction or trying to get more information. How many missed calls and missed returns calls volleyed in a row before it starts to feel like a bad game? How many days in a row can you cheerfully weather of not getting to talk, or being cut short because the timing is poor before you start to feel not listened to, disconnected, not cared about? Being heard, having your time to speak, as well as being spoken to, being considered worth telling things to, seems critical to forming bonds. And maybe because we all touch base so often, we have adjusted to this constant reassurance and continued construction of the relationship in virtual space, that we are not resilient to sudden breaks in transmission.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

How do people find their niche?

The Melville Society is dedicated to the study and appreciation of the nineteenth-century American author Herman Melville, writer of Typee, Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd, such short stories as “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” and several volumes of poetry, including Battle-Pieces and the epic Clarel.

We publish the award-winning journal Leviathan and meet twice a year for fellowship and scholarly discourse at the annual conferences of the Modern Language Association and the American Literature Association. We also sponsor International Conferences and tours every other year.


How? How do you one day wake up and decide to join the Melville Society and meet once a year to discuss Moby-Dick, again? I am not saying it's a bad choice, or an arbitrary one, it just surprises me often that people have the clarity of direction to snuggle into one of the quazillion cultural niches offered by pursuits of the mind, and pick it as their own. I'm baffled, amused, curious, and slightly in awe of it. I feel the same way towards these people who join the Melville Society as I do towards someone who decides to live up a tree house, or only eat peanut butter sandwhiches, or that they are going to pick a language to study - 'great!' I think. 'Funky and cool thing to do... but how the hell did you get to that decision? And how did you make it?' How do people find their niche?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Website of the week

I have been quite taken by this site today. I like the intense faces and good colours and interesting quotes in scratchy handwriting. It's a nice idea for a collection of portraits.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

what's new

Oh it's a late one tonight - late home from work I stumble across the traffic lights with lights from several lanes of stilled cars shining at me like I am some uninspired stage performer - spot light, yes, I will just walk past you - how's that for a show?

I wore peep toe shoes and stockings with toes in them today. I've seen it in the magazines, so thought phuk it, I can do that, I can be devil may careish about the rules of fashion. I can wear my favourite shoes and favourite tights together even if they're different colours and even if they're made for different climatic conditions, like strange time travelers thrown together who are never normally seen together in the same season. So I did. And I think they were great.

Tonight I was in the bathroom and saw a giant mummy cockroach laying an egg. It was half out and she scurried and hid in the shadow of a plant pot. Found myself grappling with strange feeling of half repulsion, half empathy. It's not like I think she needs a birthing suite at St Vincents or something but I kind of felt for her that she had to freeze and then scurry, in fear of being squashed by the giant human, in this private moment. It's weird to think that cockroaches actually have sex. They don't look all that cuddly. Of all the animals in the world they really seem like the ones least likely to sidle up for a bit of nookie, don't you think? Somehow too alien and independent for that. You never even see them lazing about, laying down, curled up half asleep, hanging out close to each other or playing together. Maybe that's why they're so creepy to us, they don't seem to have an off button. They're always positioned on all fours ready to go, scuttling along. Like some kind of semi-sentient car with creepy antennae. Hmm, I'm not doing so well at loving all the creatures am I? I do try.

Worked my ass off (ee aw, ee aw) today to help get a proposal in for a project that I'm not even sure I want to work on. But there I am in the team structure, there I am as the contact person. It seems so ridiculous that you're meant to think about these things in such a short amount of time when they influence the shape and flavour of your working days for the next (in this case) year and a half. Do I want to work on (topic X) for half of my working hours? Do I like doing big unwieldy literature reviews and stakeholder engagement on techie issues? I don't even know if I do. Sometimes I think I much prefer looking up close at a very small amount than looking quickly at a lot. This project will be a bit like the latter. I can do that kind of thing but I don't actually like it much, I get antsy that I haven't had time to think about it, let things soak in, get around the detail and nuance. It's also a topic I don't have heaps of cred in and so will be winging it, oh winging it again (sorry - learning by doing), which is ok, but always makes me feel a bit behind, kind of apologetic and defensive when sandwiched up against people who've taken 3 years to do a PhD on something, or industry folk who've worked in that one area for like the last 10 years. And maybe none of that would matter much if I had a cool team to work on it with and I felt like I was learning, but I'm pretty much going to be the team on this one, apart from random bits from other too busy to talk people.

Oh and I'm worried all the stakeholders will be very suity and gruff and technical minded (it goes with the topic), not fun and interesting lateral thinkers or creative types. But that's a terrible cliche and I really have no firm basis for that.

It's hard though, hard for me to say 'yeah, you know what, I don't think so - it just doesn't seem like my cup of tea'. I feel like if I can do it I ought to. I'm needed. I step in to do what's needed. Nevermind what it feels like. Well until half way in when I'm stressed and bored silly and want to scream.

And anyway it's one thing to know what feels maybe not satisfying, and another thing to know what does, and another thing altogether to think that your own feelings matter enough to shape what you do and to express it. But blah, blah, we've been here before.

I should probably right now stick to my own recently adopted self talk maxim of 'you're tired, of course it looks hard right now when you're pooped, but you don't have to figure it out now, have a good night's sleep and see how it looks later'. Or 'glass half full' as one housemate (who is not always that optimistic himself) has been coaching the other recently, in only a semi-ironic way.

So that's whats new here in seagreen land today.