On stargazing and the sad state of my eyes

30 January, 2009

I wandered outside last night--something I'm not wont to do, being a civilised human and all we apparently don't come into contact with real nature and 'true dark.' Ja. It's true. It's sad. I'd rather stay inside with my lappy and watch DVDs than take a walk outside and come in contact with the seedier elements of Australian fauna. You can't blame me, something makes these gods-awful noises in the night--a kind of indescribable animal call that chills me somewhere primordial.

Anyway. I wandered outside last night. It was inky dark pitted and marred by the lights of humanity. I manoeuvred myself so that the Chilean willows blocked out the neighbour's porch light, the fir tree the street light and turned my eyes upwards to that great patch of vacuum and dust that has inspired us to great feats of the imagination.

Gods it was beautiful.

The Milky Way was splashed from one side of the horizon to the other. Orion was at one end and the Southern Cross the other. I stood like that for an age and imagined that the patch of sky and stars directly above me were all I could see and that I was not standing in my backyard but out in the black surrounded on all sides by pinpricks of history. Not blinking, but cold and hard light.

I took off my glasses and all dimmed. The sky was still the sky but the stars were no longer defined and sharp and beautiful. The Milky Way was just a soft, white blur. Orion was just a thin strip made of Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. The Southern Cross could have been any vague quadrangle.

Everytime I'm confronted by such awesome scenes I feel distinctly how my genes have let me down. What I wouldn't give to see such things with my bare eyes and not through the help of bent glass.

Fortresses of clouds on a clear sky. The slanting of rain on the distant mount. The choppy sea and, in the horizon, the faint outline of the city buildings.

You lose all perception of depth and detail and the world becomes a life seen through an Impressionist brush.

And it's fucking sad.

On the hottest week in a century

29 January, 2009

Melbourne braces for record heatwave. Victoria readies for week of scorchers.

I cannot describe the discomfort of living through consecutive days of above 40 degree temperature. Without air-conditioning. All our neighbours are whirring away while we sweat away in our dark rooms without the aid of modern technology. Yesterday, I was bubbly about doing my part for good ole Earth. Today, I'm a little cranky (who am I kidding? I'm soaked in bloody sweat!!) but my resolve is holding the fort. It's no longer a wonder, though, why people choose personal comfort over, say, the environment. Immediate gratification over long-term gain. I guess that we devolve to our animalistic natures when it gets to be a little too much.

I had a brief moment of pure Schadenfreude this afternoon when we had a power cut. Sure, I was left without internet, but to hear the indignant cries of my neighbours upon the failing of their air-conditioners was blissful. Pity it only lasted for about 15 minutes.

I'm retaining my fluids and drinking green tea by the gallons. Peeing comes in a far second from sweating. I've given up wearing pants and am just chilaxing in my underwear. Sorry, furniture.

My mum--being a TCM practitioner--has knocked a good amount of life tips into me before I started on the path of being a modern medicine believer. Now, I'm a healthy(?) mixture of the two. Something that both gets to me and for which I am glad is the fact that she abhors the 'Western habit' of eating cold things in hot weather and has drummed it into me that it is not a worthy habit to uptake. Sweating is good for you and cleans the toxins from the body...and all that. So we drink hot/warm boiled water--rarely straight from the tap for me and never for my parents--and hot/warm tea, take hot soup for lunch and dinner--all the more opportunity to work those sweat glands. Sure, it sounds gross but hot darn does it feel good afterwards, when we're chilaxing with our hand fans. Between feeling really hot and dry or hot and sweating, I'd take the latter any day.

This also means the smallest amount of ice cream, chilled fruits, chilled fruit juices, ice cubes, etc. I don't mind that much since I've never had much of a sweet tooth. Sure, I don't mind the occasional smoothie or juice but if the world were to go without Rocky Road or Death by Chocolate, I wouldn't shed a tear.

I guess that makes it all the easier to bear.

Anyway, cold things just aren't that dinkum for the stomach so I'll stick to taking them in moderation no matter how unbearably hot it gets.

One thing I can't stand is this: EVERYTHING NOW IS WARMER THAN ROOM TEMPERATURE:

• I had an apple for lunch and it tasted like it had been boiled.
• I went to the toilet and let me just say, the Japanese aren't the only ones with warm toilet seats
• The back doors that open on to the deck are both sticking because the metal door jams have warped due to the heat
• The cold water's hot--I don't meant warm, I mean it's around 40 degrees
• You don't have to wait for the hot water to heat up anymore
• My laptop heats up really fast and can get uncomfortable to use :(
• Every bit of furniture feels like the unfortunate victims of some warm behind (not mine) and anything metal/glass feels like it is part of an oven

I dread to open my violin case and pluck the strings. I wonder how badly out of tune they have loosened.

And on a more sinister note, I wonder how hard and how fast the bushfires will burn this year. I worry about my friends in the MFB and CFA and hope, for their sake, that some bastard isn't getting his rocks off throwing lighters, cigarette butts and other incendiaries around. Not surprisingly the state in a state (hah) of total fire ban. I remember one year it was so bad that the CBD was shrouded in an eerie smog and on the other side of the Dandenongs was burning so badly that we could smell the smoke that had drifted over the mountain. Natural and controlled are one thing, but what I wouldn't give to eat the souls of incendiaries.

I'm also glad that I'm still on holidays this month, with Connex cancelling half the peak hour services--I'm still getting the SMS alerts. The poor commuters. We really need high heat resistant infrastructure.


Ah. A cool wind is starting up outside. I think I'll go and check it out.

With pants on.

On the reasons for sticky hands

28 January, 2009

• eating an apple
• going at a mango (the unsophisticated method--bare hands vs. spoon)
• typing on keyboard
• hot laptop
• reading a book in hot weather--wrinkles the paper, too
• chocolate-coated biscuits
• eating Ferrero Rochers layer by layer

In general, due to the damn heat, I am going to wash my hands every 10 minutes or so.

On inactivity in the summer season

Curtains drawn to keep out every electromagnetic wave I can and windows closed to the smallest gap so that the warm breaths of air stays as far away from the cool of of darkened rooms. Without air-conditioning, a comfortable living temperature can only be achieved by great effort. I take solace in knowing that I am doing my part in keeping it cool. And by 'it' I mean the Earth. Yeah. Rock on.

In reality, though, our AC is an historic remnant of the previous owners of our house and smells distinctly of Urine of Possum when turned on. Not something we would hazard--the heat being uncomfortable enough as it is. [I would like to take this moment to note that everything that smells funny around these parts is usually due to some sort of dubious possum activity--I shall postulate on this in greater detail when I am not feeling so slothlike.]

Fans, on the other hand, do little but stir the warm air up a bit and spreads it around. The last thing I would probably want is for all that heat to be moving. Best to stay where it is, languishing with the rest of us.

I have my laptop on and am soothed and caressed by the dulcet voices of Samuel West, Ian McKellen, Bryan Dick, Linus Roache and Michael Sheen. I languish prettily to Keats and Shakespeare and thank all gods for Michael Tavener; my heart ached for the Angel of Covent Garden and poor, vengeful Wayland; and I lay back and let the Pity of War sweep over me in its sad grandeur and lost nostalgia.

Oh, audio plays. Oh, radio.

I can forget--for an hour or more--that the sun is beating down hard on the garden outside; drying the bark of the eucalyptus so that it curls and crinkles and hangs off the trees in strips like hair, drying the ground so that when it rains it floods for the clay has been baked hard, bleaching the wood so that everything not living becomes as brittle and dry as the land. The cicadas call and the magpies have laid off their warbling for the shadier, cooler time of evening.

On the perceived literary pecking order

24 January, 2009

Most people I know reread a favourite book every year. For my old English teacher, Paul Upperton, it was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Incidentally, this turned out to be the case for a large portion of my class--not surprising, really, since we were all in awe of his literary prowess, fascinated by his well-travelled, well-read, well-written life and saw in him a bastion of Who's Who (or: What's What) in Literature.

At the time I did not think that I had such a habit (short interest span to be under consideration) and could barely think up a title that I held in particular reverence (commitment problems.) I felt my position in the literary world (as it were) drop a few notches to rest amongst those who read maybe one decent novel a year and bought all their quick fixes from the nearest Kmart. Oh, it was indecent! Suddenly I felt so unread amidst my well-educated peers and our pretentious, pre-examination discources over the latest in classic Russian literature lacked its usual Chekhovian ...oomph.

I have now long graduated into the wonderful world of tertiary education where most of my course comrades belong to the one-to-none-novel-a-year category. The Lord of the Rings people are reading humanities--history, linguistics, law. I have, though, managed to climb a few rungs of that secret social ladder. In a way, I am back to where I was before this darned dilemma but I am certainly not up with the real socialites and important personages of the well-read.

Every year now, I lay my hands on a precious book. I hold closed its broken spine, open the cover and mentally feel as if I am sinking into the most comfortable armchair ever to be upholstered. It was the book that saved me when I was fifteen, carried me through University entry examinations when I was eighteen and is now seeing me through this current literary desert on my path in life. It is certainly not something as prestigious as reading Tolkien or even good old Fyodor (Dostoevsky) and perhaps the very sight of its shoddy grammar and dodgy publishing typos would send the linguistics Nazis into a frenzy but it is what can be considered my annual habit. Which book?

Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

Yeah, I am as shallow as a pond.

On the end of the cyber-trail

I've left rabbit holes all over the interwebs. An account here, a profile there, a brief flash of interest; I wonder what has become of them, left behind, blowing in the binary winds.

And, currently, it all ends here.