Variations on a theme

There are two types of people in this world - you, and me.

There is one type of person in this world, and you're neither.

There are two types of men and women in this world, and... oh bugger.

Sartorialisms

Why is it that can never find my underpants when I want them? That's a sentence you might equally expect to come from a person with dementia, a nudist who is due to attend an important interview with a non-nude person, a person who has is secretly being stalked by the neighbourhood snowdropper, and me. Is it because my underpants are hiding from me or something? Or do I actually have dementia but forgot about it? (No, no, no need to tell me, I'm happy as I am.)

In other sartorial matters, I discovered on the train this evening that I had buttoned up my shirt the wrong way. Although I did put the bottom button in the bottom button hole, and proceeded up the shirt in the usual manner, I discovered too late that the bottom button hole and the bottom button didn't actually match up. So my shirt's ganging up on me now?

Also, any attempts to take a pink frilly brolly with spots in to work furtively, in order to make sure it is not noticed, are sadly misguided*. Who knew?

*And after all that it didn't rain anyway. I ask you! Whinge whinge grumble grumble harrumph grump.

A philosophical moment with Timothy Train

Speaking of trains of thought, here is a thought by a Train:

Um.... er.... er... hmmm.... ah..... er.... mmm.... right.... um....

Well, this is all frightfully embarassing, isn't it?

What disturbs our blood

Time! What is it, where does it come from, where does it go to, and what does time do when it gets some... time off? These, and other mysteries of science, have been contemplated by, um, scientists, throughout, er, time. Also, according to traditional Einsteinian theory, space is bent, time is queer, and the speed of light gets to go out to all the cool nightclubs after midnight when it's everyone else's bedtime. Though I have no idea what this has to do with anything anyway. (And now I should close this opening paragraph because, ladies and gentlemen, it's time.)

Traditional scientific models suggests that time is divided into 'centuries' and 'years' and 'months' and 'weeks' and 'days' and 'hours' and 'minutes' and 'seconds'. But traditional scientific models have been proven to be wrong, for, as we all know, time largely consists of 'those bits where we're doing stuff and it passes really quickly', 'those bits where we're not doing anything and time doesn't seem to pass at all', and 'the bits that fall in between'.

For this essay, we are concerned with that particular part of the space-time nexus known as 'holiday time'. Holiday time, as you know, has several peculiarities: when you are off it, you want to be on it, and when you are on it, you spend all the time wondering how long you have left before you will be off it again.

But anyway, what is the best type of holiday time? Some people are particularly fond of 'long weekend holiday time', others of 'two or three weeks overseas holiday time'. Some people have a lot to say for 'day off holiday time', which doesn't have many people left over for that piece of holiday time known as 'the weekend'.

Well, I say the weekend is definitely the best. Like the rest of Australia, I've taken off the Friday following Australia Day, and spent half of that time mooching around the house wondering what to do with myself. During the Christmas holidays I was even worse, getting under everybody's feet, and by the time it was half over I had no idea what day it was, and whether I should be back at work by tomorrow or whether I still had two weeks to go, which is pretty nerve-wracking, for you are not sure whether you should worry about not going back to a job that you should have already gone back to, or worrying about when you are going to have to start worrying about that. A two or three weeks overseas holiday is nearly the worst of all, because you spend most of that time wondering how much of it you've got left, and a good deal of it anxious that you don't miss your next flight. And if you have any time left over from that, you spend it fretting about the flight you just missed and now how the hell you're going to spend your time.

Not that I mean to suggest that work time is any better. My goodness, no. If you spend a lot of a normal holiday wondering what to do with yourself, you spend a lot of work knowing exactly what to do with yourself, and wanting intensely to do something different anyway.

No, I put it to you that nothing could be more special than a weekend, that time when you have nothing special to do. What could be better than 'nothing special'? And what could be more suitable for nothing special than the weekend, when you have time to potter around, doing all the usual things you ordinarily do, in an exceedingly everyday manner? The weekend is the best time, I say. There ought to be more of them. (Now, if scientists could only figure out how to do that, life would be sweet.)

Then again, we could adopt an alternative philosophy, as expressed by poet W B Yeats:

THROUGH winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there s nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come -
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.

Hope you're having a cheerful time, cheerful people!

Awkwardness

awkwardness (n) - a red car with green Christmas tinsel... on Australia Day.

Misunderstatement

"It was hot, so I was standing around the house in my underwear when the neighbour walked in with a jar of pickled onions."

How many people have used that excuse, do you think?

Add one to the list.

UPDATE! - It's fun playing around with sentences! Instead of...

"It was hot, so I was standing around the house in my underwear when the neighbour walked in with a jar of pickled onions."

... imagine that I'd rearranged the words, thusly:

"So, I was standing around the house in my underwear when the neighbour walked in with a jar of pickled onions. It was hot."

Or even -

"So, I was standing around the house when the neighbour walked in with a jar of pickled onions in my underwear. It was hot."

I'm not thinking what you're not thinking either, and I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that none of that happened. At all.

Send a social worker for the social networker

3000 facebook friends
And some are really real.
An evening watching YouTubes
With crackers for a meal.

*

Nine comments on my blogpost!
A fluffy kitten. SQUEE!
If people like my status,
Does that mean they like me?

*

Attending three events -
That's just about my day.
OMFG I got
A tweet on Q&A!

The bloodcurdling battle between man and paper bag

The paper bag that held the mushrooms had somehow developed an extra hole in it, so when I took it out of the fridge, all the mushrooms fell out.

I immediately uttered a barbaric yawp*, and, crying, "Stupid bloody mushroom bag," hurled the paper bag across the room.

The paper bag, now unemcumbered by mushrooms, or, apparently, gravity, floated languidly in the air, twisting and twining elegantly in the wind currents that I had no idea existed in the kitchen, and performed several graceful pirouettes before coming to a peaceful rest on the floor, five centimetres from my feet.

You win this round, paper bag. You win this round.

*'Barbaric yawp' - is any other form of yawp possible? What say you, scholars of yawp?

The rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and rise and rise and rise and fall of the Steve Reich

I wanted to listen to some meditative, repetitive music, somewhat in the style of those American minimalists you all will never have heard of. You know, Phillip Glass, Terry Riley...

But then I listened to Steve Reich and realised that I didn't want to listen to what I wanted to listen to.

Communications devolution

Seeing an e-reader on the train the other day, I was inspired with an overwhelming desire not to get one. No surprises there as I am an old grouch in a younger person's body, and I have that inspiration almost every day, but seriously, why buy them? Because you can't get a paper book with buttons on it? If I had a book like that, I'd spend all my time changing channels and never bother actually reading a book, which would somewhat defeat the purpose, old bean.

It's getting harder to keep up with the latest thing in the world of stuff. we don't just have to deal with the communications revolution, but the communications insurrection that happened after the first communications revolution, and then the communications putsch that happened after the communications insurrection, and then the communications coup, and the ongoing communications civil war, and so on, and so on. If I had kept up with all the things I was meant to keep up with in the thirty odd years that I have been on this earth, I would now be in possession of not only a laptop, and a blog, and an email, and a mobile phone, and a television, but I would also have an iPod, an iPad, an iBook, a video player, a cassette deck, a tape answering machine, a Super 8 player, a twitter account, a tumblr account, a fax machine, a Nintendo, an Atari, a Commodore 64, a Kodak camera, a ham radio set, a UHF, several phrase books of Japanese-English, French-English, Auslan-English, and possibly a set of message flags, a pigeon farm, and a telegraph machine. What would I do with all those things? I don't even want a bloody NBN, which Stephen Conroy keeps threatening me with.*

I mean, it's all a bit much for me. When I was a kid, communications was simple: the phone would ring, you would race your brothers to get it, and wrestle it out of their hands before shouting

HELLOTWOOHONEFOURONESIX!

And waiting for the lovely connection ladies on the other end to ask you nicely if your parents were around.** Now that is what communications should be about, ladies and gentlemen. Why did things ever change?

*Should be another ten years or so before it arrives anyway, there is that at least.

**Yes, we had a telephone exchange in Balranald. I guess we must have been one of the last places in Australia to get a wired up properly.

Piffolous poffolous

You just know when you're reading a political article about Tony Abbott, and you're scratching your head, and the words 'homophilous thought leader' and 'monomorphic thought leader' and 'heterophily' and 'polymorphic heterophil' all appear, and you have no idea what it all means, that you're reading an article by a teacher of political communication. Who else could write such a thing?

Anyway, Tony Abbott is apparently monomorphic and homophilous. Aren't we all, really, from time to time? But the thing that's really getting my knickers in a knot is this: when I get up in the morning, what with all the 'homo' this and 'mono' that and 'philous' every other thing, how am I going to be able to tell my heterophilous from my homophilous from my Sophie Panopolous from my acidophilous, hey? Tell me that.

Homophilous.


Achidophilous.

It's all very confusing.

Train things

People have curious habits on the train. I like to sit in one of those sets of four seats facing one another, with the wall on my right, facing in the direction the train goes, ideally with room to stretch, although I'd just settle for the first. Others seem to shun these seats that face one another, and prefer the boxed-in variety. They make me feel claustrophobic just looking at them.

This morning, sitting on one of the only available seats in a crowded train, I noticed a woman get on, and give the seat next to me a swift brushing off with her fingers, several times, before sitting down. I'm pretty sure the seat didn't have any dirt on it. Was she just brushing off the imaginary dirt?

The night before, I had seen, a few seats over - again on one of the sets of four facing seats - a woman, in pink, facing away from the direction the train was travelling in. Opposite her were two MX papers and a chip wrapper. When someone on the seat in front of her got up and left, she stood up and walked over to that seat and sat down, now facing in the direction the train was going. This - rather than picking up the chip packet and MX papers! I found that rather strange.

Then again, I have changed seats several times on the one train journey, in order to get a slightly more optimum seat. Sometimes, I have changed seats just to get a nicer view (and wouldn't you?)

A girl fainted on the train this morning. This has happened before; a hot crowded train can do that to you, especially if you're tired and dehydrated. Well, what with everyone the train moving back to give her room, and several people moving forward to help, and the train driver coming to meet her and assure her staff would be there to meet her at Flinders Street, and almost everyone staring at her for the rest of the trip, I was feeling quite sorry for her. I'm sure she got her water at Flinders - but is there a cure for chronic embarrassment?

Last night, on the train from work to Spencer Street station (where I changed over), I was also rather impressed by Spiffing Spanish Guy. He stood at the door I was planning to get off, resplendent in yellow lycra and sunglasses, balancing a bike in one hand, and holding a mobile in the other while he spoke in rapid Spanish to someone on the other end. As the train rattled and clunked and he rolled his rrrrs and intoned his intonations, something seemed to happen, and quite suddenly, he began saying, over and over again: "Hallo? Hallo? Sophia. Hallo? Sophia. Sophia. Hallo?" However, as the train pulled into Spencer Street, the reception seemed to clear up, and somehow - not sure how he did this - he managed to open the door, balance the bike, and keep the phone to his ear at the one time, and, still talking continuously to his Sophia, carried the bike up the escalator in front of me. He even got on the same train as me, and sat up the back with his bike and his phone, talking for the next half hour until we pulled into Lalor station. Spiffing work, Spiffing Spanish guy.