Catcher

Catcher catcher Mason
Catch me if you can
I'm a fan of any man
Who knows just where he stands

Wind and sea and starshine
Are ever just the same
Catcher catcher Mason
Did you catch my name?

Catcher catcher Mason
Ever and again
There's a long and winding road
Which never feels the rain

All the world's a lost boat
The stars can never find
Catcher catcher Mason
I can catch in kind

Falling Slowly

My grandmother didn't die last weekend.

We were kind of expecting her to - she looked worse than she had for a while. There was trouble breathing, trouble swallowing and a throat infection of some sort (don't ask me which was caused by what), and it looked like something that might finally get the better of what's left of her.

But... she didn't die. She's slightly better now. I suppose I should be happy about that, and on one level I am. Mostly, I'm just resigned.

It reminded me, though, how we're still expecting her to die on poetic grounds. It's like we've read and heard too many stories about people dying once they've done this, that or the other, and we keep looking for the poetic moment of closure, after which she can "rest".

Time after time there's a moment, a milestone, a visit, an illness... and we think she's surely had enough now. Now she's had the chance to say or do x, y or z - so she should just go to sleep and let go... right?

Somehow we've all got this strange idea that life is some big switch that we can choose to keep on or turn off depending on whether or not we have the will to keep living. It's this concept that just seems to haunt the collective consciousness of our culture.

Watching my grandmother sink into death over the last few years, though, and looking at her neighbours in the nursing home doing the same thing, I don't think life is that co-operative.

I think it doesn't matter how much you might want to stop living, you just keep falling slowly until you've run out of space to fall.

The more we treat ourselves and our loved ones with medicines and care designed to "help" them, the more falling space we give them. Living longer is not necessarily living better - it's just living longer. We don't get to "drift away" just because we've had that final, poetic moment and "now we can rest". We just keep falling slowly...

At some point, life stops being a gift and becomes a sentence. No poetry in the world can change that.

For Nic

Not Quite Goodbye

And so you’re leaving here
You’re going away
And this is it, right now,
It’s your last day
We will be sad to see you go
But I won’t say goodbye
No, I won’t say goodbye

So I guess it’s:
So long, I’ll see you on Facebook
I’ll RSS your blog to my reader
I’ll chat to you on Tuesday if we’re both online
I have to say:
It’s true, we are gonna miss you
We’ll miss your face around these parts
But once you get that webcam we’ll all be just fine

Goodbye is just so last century

And now the time has come
To pack up your things
And when tomorrow comes
You’ll spread your wings
You know, we hate to see you go
But I won’t say goodbye
No, I won’t say goodbye

So I guess it’s:
So long, I’ll see you on Facebook
I’ll RSS your blog to my reader
I’ll chat to you on Tuesday if we’re both online
I have to say:
It’s true, we are gonna miss you
We’ll miss your face around these parts
But once you get that webcam we’ll all be just fine

Goodbye is just so last century

High Romance

I'm reading Jane Eyre again.

I have to admit, that can be a little dangerous. I have a thing about Charlotte Brontë's novels - particularly Villette and especially Jane Eyre.

I just seem to move into a different head space where nothing seems to be entirely real or applicable unless it has something to do with Gothic Romance.

What do I care of your petty, work-a-day questions when there are souls rent asunder by cruel circumstance?

Who can condone wasting time on statistics and what-not when there are those who feel such keen pain, having to watch the one they love pledge themselves to one inferior to them? Or, worse still, one perfectly suited and superior in every way?

Do you think my heart made of stone, that I can tolerate such careless questions as "what did you bring for lunch" when she may never see him again - and the hurt is such that it stops her very breath in her throat?

*Ahem*

Sorry about that.

Plus, Jane Eyre is one of those triggers which makes me remember all the books I was going to write, and I start thinking about those plots again. Stories I'm reading and stories I'm dreaming just seem to swirl around in my brain, and I have great difficulty focusing on the here and now.

Strangely, I don't have this problem with Austen. I think she might have been too tame - not quite "high" enough to take my brain and knock it sideways. Sure, Pride and Prejudice kind of rocks, but it doesn't have me off in la-la land so thoroughly.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though can have me reeling after just one sonnet. I think if I ever read Jane Eyre and Sonnets from the Portugese at the same time I would be rendered completely useless.

I'd probably enjoy it, though...

We all spend our holidays in Viljandi

Strangely, since coming back to Australia, the part of Estonia that keeps playing on my mind is not Palmse, which was one of the most beautiful places I've been to in my life, nor Tallinn, which was quite a nice city with a brilliant fusion of ancient and modern. Nor was it Tartu, where I happily spent three days, and probably would have stayed for longer had I not been on a mission to see more of the country.

No, it's Viljandi. I was there for about 24 hours, and saw most of the place in one morning walk. I thought it was a nice enough town - nicer than many of the other towns I had seen, but nothing terribly thrilling or gripping...

Yet I keep thinking it would be a nice place to live, or at least stay for a summer holiday. Okay beach, nice lake, nice parks, nice ruined castle thingy... nice spirit. I want to see it when it's not raining - after all, it was nice enough when freezing cold and wet.



Thinking about it now, I realise I liked the 'feel' of the place - the folk music center, the castle that doubled as an out-door theatre, the puppet theatre (which wasn't showing anything during the time when I was there, dammit) and all that jazz. I'm used to small towns being a little bit country. This place was a little bit folksy - and fiercely proud of it.

It was nice. It was the kind of place where you could relax, but still be in the heart of something. You could listen to a concert or go for a long walk beside the lake. You could be part of a festival, or just sit in a park and read a book.

I think nice places don't get enough praise for simply being nice.

Some places just feel good. Viljandi is one of them.

Things librarians try not to think about

I received this explanation for a system malfunction in an email this morning:

Services have been restored on the HPRC NAS servers. A full filesystem, due to core dumps from DMF software, caused the High Availability software to "flap". The filesystem is common to both servers, hence the service wouldn't start succesfully on either server, leading to the "flapping". Scripts are being written to avoid
this particular problem in future.

I have a feeling I don't even want to know what it means. Sadly, I think this was meant to be the "user friendly" version.



PS, the quote is cut and paste from the email - their spelling errors, not mine.

Image of the Week

Now, remember folks, just because this is the "image of the week", that doesn't mean there's going to be one every week. Just thought I'd point that out.



Okay, this isn't one of the "puzzle-worthy" photos I like to take while I'm on holidays (I have a strange need to try to take photos that would make good jigsaw puzzles), but it's kind of special to me.

This was #53 - the bike that was my sole companion for a week in Estonia. We had a fairly good relationship: it fell over a few times, usually under circumstances I didn't think warranted falling over, but at least it never did that while I was on it. It held up brilliantly throughout the tour (under admittedly cushy conditions, when you consider the grand spectrum of bike touring) and, all in all, I was most impressed by #53's performance. It confirmed my opinion about Merida bikes, and my next bike is definitely going to be a Merida. Or a Pinarello - but that's just because I think they're pretty.

Anyway, the bike is only part of the picture. Behind it you can see the northern coastline of Estonia. This was taken just outside of Kaberneeme, and for a few kilometres of coast there is this wonderful section of forest with little or no undergrowth. You can see all sorts of tracks through the trees, and get a decent glimpse of the ocean from the road. 'Twas a very pretty place to ride a bike, it must be said.

A thing of beauty...

On a bus trip between Pärnu and Tallinn, I found myself sitting next to a young Estonian woman who was busily crocheting a bag of some description.

I didn't know what she was crocheting originally but, in the time-honoured tradition of librarians, I asked her and was rewarded with an answer. From enquiring about her own käsitöö project, we went on to discuss the Estonian obsession with woolen crafts and ended up discussing various other aspects of the Estonian culture and landscape.

It was a very interesting conversation, and I'm sure it will provide fodder for a number of future posts.

Among the things discussed, we got around to talking about ugly apartment buildings. Now, I have previously mentioned the proliferation of ugly apartment buildings in Estonia, as well as my opinion that it was some sort of plot by the Soviets to crush the souls of the occupied peoples. Either that, or provide cheap accommodation. Either way, they're really ugly - and not in a good way.

I mentioned this to my crocheting companion, and she confirmed the "affordable housing" theory, and agreed that the buildings were unnecessarily horrible. There was no good purpose for making a building look that much like soulless slab of concrete, but the Soviets just didn't bother making things pretty.

In the course of the conversation, we came to the conclusion that this was their biggest mistake - they never improved anything. They never made a place better for having them there.

Now, it must be stressed that I'm talking about the Soviets, not the Russians. When you see the buildings created by the "old believers" and the Russians fleeing Soviet Russia, they're quite nice. Heck, their churches are absolutely amazing - I didn't see a single Russian Orthodox church that wasn't fabulous.

No, it's the Soviets who, for some reason, decided that the only way all citizens of the USSR could be equal was for them all to be equally miserable.

The Russians still like to think their "occupation" was something else - something nice. They didn't replace one undesirable regime with another one, they "liberated" these vulnerable countries from the Nazis. The countries they took under their wing were better off - being members of the Soviet Union was good for them, and they should be grateful...

Let's not go into the politics for why the Soviets didn't actually liberate the Estonians from anyone - let's instead look at the ugly apartment buildings:







(These aren't the worst apartment buildings I saw in Estonia, just the worst ones I could find on KV.EE when I was only going to spend less than five minutes looking.)

Now, seriously, who could possibly be grateful for having those things shoved into your previously nice, pretty town? And that's not all. While the Soviets were in town, they also burnt down the nice buildings and knocked over the statues and public works of art - then replaced them with new buildings and monuments that were... *ahem*... "functional" and "workmanlike", and were specifically designed to inspire people to remember they were all comrades under the Soviet government.

I'm sorry, Mr Stalin, but workmen are allowed to have some beauty in their lives as well - and things can be "functional" without being devoid of any pleasing qualities.

If the Soviets had only let people keep their own art and culture and create their own beautiful things, instead of pushing them all through the "miserable and ugly" Soviet cookie-cutter, they might have been tolerated quite happily. Instead, they moved into town and made things worse - not better.

That's (one of the reasons) why the occupied countries will probably never see the Soviets as a kind and benevolent people who were only trying to make the world a better place.

So, if anyone else out there is thinking of starting up a totalitarian regime and calling it a "benevolent" power, I have a piece of advice for you: make sure everything you do is beautiful in some way. People may take a lot longer to notice you're squeezing them dry if you aren't also crushing their souls.

Sugar!

I was listening to a short talk on the radio this morning concerning the evils of sugar. It was quite an interesting talk, filled with many "well, now that you mention it, it's kind of obvious" points. The talk was by David Gillespie, author of the book Sweet Poison

You can listen to it, or read the transcript, here. At least, for a little while. I don't know how long these episodes are available, but I have a feeling it's about four weeks.

Anyway, the gist of the argument is that we started getting fat after we started eating gobs of mass-produced sugar and other products containing fructose. Once upon a time, these things were fairly rare and we only ate about a kilo of fructose a year. Now, sugar and fruit-based substances (a major source of fructose) are everywhere, and we consume about a kilo of fructose roughly every ten days.

This is a problem, because our bodies aren't designed to process fructose effectively, so they: a) forget to mention you've had enough to eat and should stop feeling hungry now, and b) turn that fructose into fat straight away, for want of something better to do with it.

He points out that "big sugar" is as dangerous a force as "big tobacco", and we should be seriously considering the amount of sugar/fructose we put in our mouths.

One of the points he raises is that the whole "eat less fat, exercise more" mantra that nutritionists have been sprouting and the governments have been supporting for the last couple of decades won't help us much if we keep replacing the fat in our diets with sugar. Something along the lines of:

Milk isn't as bad for us as we think, and fruit juice is much worse than we realise.

This isn't the first time I've heard this, but like a lot of things in life you have to hear it a couple of times before the message starts to really sink in. Plus, Gillespie's a lawyer, so he knows how to sound convincing.

It fits in with my theory that convenience is killing us. I've often expressed this theory by stating, in an appropriately blasé manner, that the Industrial Revolution was a bad idea. Most people either humour me or ignore me (the story of my life, really), but I'm kind of serious about it.

Everything we've done to make life more "convenient" has encouraged us to get fat and lazy... Except that we're not designed to be fat and lazy and we don't cope with it very well. We tend to develop things like heart disease and cancer.

Even (and I know this sounds strange) being overworked and stressed is a direct result of being fat and lazy. The time and space we used to fill with the actions required for day-to-day living is now vacant, but we feel we should be doing something, so we invent more stuff to do, and then new ways to do that in less time, so that we need to invent more stuff to do... It's a vicious cycle. Rest assured I'll whinge about this again at a later date.

Anyway, this is relevant to the sugar thing because we've stopped feeding ourselves. Instead of growing our own food and preparing our own meals, we've outsourced that to other people. They make it possible for us to eat more sugar and fructose than we could possibly have managed back in the days when we were feeding ourselves. In fact, they make in impossible to avoid such things.

So, how do we fix this? How do we avoid fructose when we practically breathe the stuff?

Short of going back to growing our own food and making our own meals, I don't know. And, let's face it, we've managed to construct lives where we just don't have time and space for the actions required for day-to-day living anymore.

I'd like to get my hands on some of the recipes people used before mass-produced sugar came on the market. I have to admit, the one thing I kept thinking about while listening to Gillespie's argument was a bit, shall we say, "practical":

Without sugar, how do you make cake?

Excuse me, sir...

I'm having a "sir" day again today.

Every now and then (usually just as I'm starting to feel good about myself), someone calls me "sir", and every scrap of self-esteem I have just goes flying out the window.

Yes, I know it's my own fault. I can't dress the way I dress and expect people to get it right every time. If I only wore more "girly" clothes, did something better with my hair, wore make up and moved with smaller, more delicate actions I would be more readily recognised as a woman.

I just... you know... I suck at looking like a girl. I always have. I'm too tall, too broad-shouldered, too flat-chested. My jaw is too square, my feet are too large, my arms are too long and my hands are too big. The nice "girly" clothes only look good on the nice "girly" figures - and I just don't have one of those.

At the back of my mind, I've always worried that, if I tried to wear more "girly" clothes, I'd probably just look ridiculous at best. At worst, I'd probably look like a drag queen. I have no natural grace and beauty, and trying to wear pretty, delicate clothes would just highlight my flaws - and I know it.

And, dammit! I just can't bring myself to wear clothes that are uncomfortable, impractical and flimsy just because they're more gender appropriate. The feminist in me combines with the base functionalist in me and refuses to wear second-rate, substandard clothes just because, as a woman, I'm not entitled to wear clothes that are designed for comfort, movement and durability. You know women's clothes are just designed to keep us out of the way, right?

So, yes, I tend to wear men's shoes because my feet are big and wide and women's shoes are uncomfortably narrow. And, yes, I tend to wear men's T-Shirts because fitted T-shirts feel awkward and constricting on someone with broad shoulders. And, yes, I tend to wear men's jackets because the sleeves are actually long enough to cover my long arms and the pockets are better. So much better. The pockets they put in women's clothes suck.

I try to compensate for it by choosing styles that are as close to unisex as possible and colours that could be feminine, but that doesn't seem to make a difference. I also wear women's pants, but as I tend to go for the sensible styles, no one seems to notice. Same with the women's shirts I wear to work - too practical and "functional" to fully counteract the fact that I'm big and ugly and I look like a man.

Actually, I have to confess - I don't always wear women's pants. I tend to wear men's cycling shorts when I'm on the bike because they have better pockets.

Hell, I'm even growing my hair long so that, when people make snap judgements based on stereotypical visual cues, folks "mistake" me for a woman because I've got long hair, instead of mistaking me for a man because I'm wearing a comfortable T-shirt.

It doesn't seem to be helping, though. Just when I'm feeling good about myself and comfortable in my own skin - even while I'm riding high on a compliment that I look good after loosing weight, someone says "excuse me, sir", and everything comes crashing down. It's even worse when they do it while I actually am wearing women's clothes.

Yeah, I know the fact that I don't look like a girl means I can get away with things other girls can't (like riding a bike solo through another country), and there are times that I feel my androgynous appearance gives me a greater sense of personal security, but still...

I'm probably going to cop more of it tonight. I'm going out, but I'm staying at a friend's place and the only clothes I have to wear are unisex in nature. *Sigh*