Well, the posts here have been few and far between, I must admit, but no rarer I suppose than they usually are. Only, this time it's harder to find a computer to sit in front of and procrastinate about whether or not to write a post.
Here, also, there's so much going on that it is quite hard to know what to post about. While some of what I am experiencing here is quite familiar, and prompts the sort of thoughts I could have in Melbourne as much as here, there are some key differences that take a little longer to process but are certainly there.
One thing that has struck me about the trip so far is the key similarities between each of the major cities I have been to - all cities, in fact, with much in common with my home town. They are all cultured, not-too-densely-populated cities, all on the water, all with a strong indie/hipster subculture, all Western...Vancouver, Portland and Melbourne also all rate in those lists of the most liveable cities in the world. And you can see why. All have much to offer their residents, making them interesting cities to visit, because what is most wonderful about them is not necessarily most visible.
Yet the three cities I have been to - Vancouver, Seattle and Portland - all, at a glance, seem to have a greater emphasis on preserving natural beauty than Melbourne. Perhaps they just automatically have much more to start off with than we do, yet what they have they do an amazing job of maintaining - something that we could certainly learn from. And, it may just be an illusion, but I got the real impression that people came together a lot more in Seattle and Portland. They sat together in parks, they shared open-air music, art and culture, something that we have, at best, at Queen Vic Markets, and even then on nothing resembling the scale you see in these places.
I wonder what makes a city agree on having that kind of culture and community. I wonder what it takes to change a city to think and act that way.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
You may case the ground from the Cascades to Puget Sound...
Well, it's now the second un-jetlagged day of my trip to the Pacific North-West - something I never got around to announcing at "Ideas From the North". Oh well - here I am now, and ready to blog away.
Only, I'm not exactly sure what to say. I don't think I've ever blogged from another country before, and have always had trouble knowing what to write when I return. Hence, I think, the one fairly uninformative post I wrote after getting back from China this time last year, despite promising more. The floods of tear-filled complaints I received from all my readers were quite chastening and I swore to give you more on this trip, but travel fills your mind with so many complex and wordless impressions that it can be very difficult to distill them into a post on a blog.
I could talk, I suppose, about how travelling by myself for the first time in my life has been a challenge. I could talk about the highs (heading as far as I could from the beaten track of Bainbridge Island, and finding the magnificent, unspoilt part of the waterfront before they threaten to develop it; the incredible beauty of Northern Washington viewed from the Amtrak coach), the lows (being quietly told off for forgetting to tip in a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown - my first meal in the country); the quirky moments (seeing a man talking to his parrot Venus at the rummage table of Pike Place Markets - "That's what I think too, Venus. Just what I was about to say myself"). I could also talk about the cultural differences, the similarities, the ideas it all gives me about culture, and inclusion and exclusion...
But that would be too much to talk about here, and I haven't had enough time to think it through. I'll do my best to say more as it comes to me, but for now I think I'll just say that, highs, lows and quirks all considered, I'm happy to be here.
Only, I'm not exactly sure what to say. I don't think I've ever blogged from another country before, and have always had trouble knowing what to write when I return. Hence, I think, the one fairly uninformative post I wrote after getting back from China this time last year, despite promising more. The floods of tear-filled complaints I received from all my readers were quite chastening and I swore to give you more on this trip, but travel fills your mind with so many complex and wordless impressions that it can be very difficult to distill them into a post on a blog.
I could talk, I suppose, about how travelling by myself for the first time in my life has been a challenge. I could talk about the highs (heading as far as I could from the beaten track of Bainbridge Island, and finding the magnificent, unspoilt part of the waterfront before they threaten to develop it; the incredible beauty of Northern Washington viewed from the Amtrak coach), the lows (being quietly told off for forgetting to tip in a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown - my first meal in the country); the quirky moments (seeing a man talking to his parrot Venus at the rummage table of Pike Place Markets - "That's what I think too, Venus. Just what I was about to say myself"). I could also talk about the cultural differences, the similarities, the ideas it all gives me about culture, and inclusion and exclusion...
But that would be too much to talk about here, and I haven't had enough time to think it through. I'll do my best to say more as it comes to me, but for now I think I'll just say that, highs, lows and quirks all considered, I'm happy to be here.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Pigs at Bay
Just in case any of you were wondering - I don't have Swine Flu. Not yet, at least. Just a throat infection. A primary infection - easily treated.
Some of my colleagues seem quite keen to get the new, cool Flu of the year, though. I wonder what that says about the state that most teachers are in at this time of year - that the prospect of a week's quarantine is the only way they can countenance surviving the next few weeks.
Certainly, it's tough at the moment. We're all at our least resilient. A cranky e-mail from a moderately demanding parent last night had far more impact on me than it warranted. In fact, by about 8pm yesterday I was just about ready to pack it all in (teaching, that is - not life!) - e-mails about staff needing to do more to combat graffiti in our classrooms, whinging from stressed Year 12s, Year 8 girls implicating me in why they are being badly behaved in their Maths class (no, I don't teach them for Maths) - it does make it all feel a little bit like too much hard work.
So what better antidote, I say, than to read the poetry of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Not an obvious response, you might think, and no, it's not, but it often helps to remember that there's someone worse off than yourself - better still to see someone worse off than yourself who maintains a strange kind of grace under pressure: not because he pretended to be okay, but because he admitted to God that he wasn't.
If I look to others for confirmation that I'm doing okay, I'll be just another nervous wreck. Everyone's stressed. Everyone's tired - students, teachers, parents. Everyone. It's that time of year. No-one's really in any position to help anyone else out - not while they're doing their level best to stay afloat.
But there is one place I can go to for complete security, complete stability, complete bouyancy. Bonhoeffer, facing death, knew that only too well. I'm just facing a bad throat infection, and a few cranky kids and parents. If God could give Bonhoeffer the strength to handle what he faced, I suspect that same strength can help me out.
I might give it a try.
Some of my colleagues seem quite keen to get the new, cool Flu of the year, though. I wonder what that says about the state that most teachers are in at this time of year - that the prospect of a week's quarantine is the only way they can countenance surviving the next few weeks.
Certainly, it's tough at the moment. We're all at our least resilient. A cranky e-mail from a moderately demanding parent last night had far more impact on me than it warranted. In fact, by about 8pm yesterday I was just about ready to pack it all in (teaching, that is - not life!) - e-mails about staff needing to do more to combat graffiti in our classrooms, whinging from stressed Year 12s, Year 8 girls implicating me in why they are being badly behaved in their Maths class (no, I don't teach them for Maths) - it does make it all feel a little bit like too much hard work.
So what better antidote, I say, than to read the poetry of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Not an obvious response, you might think, and no, it's not, but it often helps to remember that there's someone worse off than yourself - better still to see someone worse off than yourself who maintains a strange kind of grace under pressure: not because he pretended to be okay, but because he admitted to God that he wasn't.
If I look to others for confirmation that I'm doing okay, I'll be just another nervous wreck. Everyone's stressed. Everyone's tired - students, teachers, parents. Everyone. It's that time of year. No-one's really in any position to help anyone else out - not while they're doing their level best to stay afloat.
But there is one place I can go to for complete security, complete stability, complete bouyancy. Bonhoeffer, facing death, knew that only too well. I'm just facing a bad throat infection, and a few cranky kids and parents. If God could give Bonhoeffer the strength to handle what he faced, I suspect that same strength can help me out.
I might give it a try.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Swine Before Pearls
When the Black Death hit London, many thought that it was a sign of God's judgment on a decadent people. Dean John Donne pondered this question, and others, in his classic Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, the work from which comes his most famous bit of prose: "No man is an islande..." through to "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." Donne, convinced that he himself had the plague, knew that he was connected to the deaths of his fellow men. One man dying meant a death for him - in both the very literal sense of contagion, and the sense of him, and of the world he lived in, losing something each time a person died.
We, unlike Donne, have grown immune to tragedy. So, when the now-infamous Swine Flu hit the news, I paid very little attention. I don't usually pay much attention to the news, I have to admit. This was no different. It felt, like most other looming tragedies, not especially real.
The jury is still out on just how bad Swine Flu actually is, but, serious or not, it is most definitely real in my bit of the world. A school teacher, I am a moving target for every Disease of the Week, and now am working in the midst of what is coming to be seen by my colleagues as a circle of Swine Flu. Schools on every side of us are closing down - first Clifton Hill, then Thornbury, then Epping, then the West...Each extreme of my trainline and Department of Education region has this new disease. And, what with the thirty-day incubation period, there's every chance that we too have the disease somewhere in our midst and are just waiting for it to emerge.
So naturally, each time someone gets a cold, the question, partly flippant, partly serious, is, "You don't have Swine Flu, do you?" One of my friends at work told me yesterday that her brother's school has it now. She lives with him. We walk and talk with the potential of disease each day.
Am I overdramatising this? Not really. Most of the time, I'm not especially concerned. But last night, when I considered doing my standard soldiering-on act at work today despite having a bad cold, I had second-thoughts on hearing my housemate, also a teacher in the North-West, say that her principal had ordered them all to stay at home if they felt at all sick. Normally happy, I suppose, to share whatever particular contagion I'm carrying, I felt that now was perhaps a time to keep it to myself. I seriously doubt it's anything more than the standard sore-threat-and-runny-nose that normally accompanies the onset of winter for most Melburnians - but, at a time like this, it doesn't hurt to be cautious.
But it's more than that. The normal response for a teacher, when sick, is to think, "But I can't afford to miss classes today. I'll have so much to catch up on." Only, now I'm thinking also about what effect a quarantine would have on end-of-semester assessment and exams, report-writing, and my planned trip to two of the world's Swine Flu hotspots in less than three weeks' time. Thinking about all that makes me realise: if my school, my life, is hit by the disease, it won't be up to me to decide what I can and can't afford to miss. Everyone's lives will be rearranged dramatically, if only for a time.
I doubt that Swine Flu says anything special about the decadence of our society today - certainly nothing more than you can tell from watching Video Hits on a Saturday morning, or looking at the glossies at the Supermarket checkout. But it says something less than ideal when a society can't afford to get sick. It suggests, I think, a bad case of priorities out of order.
I'm going to have a sleep this afternoon, and hope to rearrange some priorities before I go back to work tomorrow.
We, unlike Donne, have grown immune to tragedy. So, when the now-infamous Swine Flu hit the news, I paid very little attention. I don't usually pay much attention to the news, I have to admit. This was no different. It felt, like most other looming tragedies, not especially real.
The jury is still out on just how bad Swine Flu actually is, but, serious or not, it is most definitely real in my bit of the world. A school teacher, I am a moving target for every Disease of the Week, and now am working in the midst of what is coming to be seen by my colleagues as a circle of Swine Flu. Schools on every side of us are closing down - first Clifton Hill, then Thornbury, then Epping, then the West...Each extreme of my trainline and Department of Education region has this new disease. And, what with the thirty-day incubation period, there's every chance that we too have the disease somewhere in our midst and are just waiting for it to emerge.
So naturally, each time someone gets a cold, the question, partly flippant, partly serious, is, "You don't have Swine Flu, do you?" One of my friends at work told me yesterday that her brother's school has it now. She lives with him. We walk and talk with the potential of disease each day.
Am I overdramatising this? Not really. Most of the time, I'm not especially concerned. But last night, when I considered doing my standard soldiering-on act at work today despite having a bad cold, I had second-thoughts on hearing my housemate, also a teacher in the North-West, say that her principal had ordered them all to stay at home if they felt at all sick. Normally happy, I suppose, to share whatever particular contagion I'm carrying, I felt that now was perhaps a time to keep it to myself. I seriously doubt it's anything more than the standard sore-threat-and-runny-nose that normally accompanies the onset of winter for most Melburnians - but, at a time like this, it doesn't hurt to be cautious.
But it's more than that. The normal response for a teacher, when sick, is to think, "But I can't afford to miss classes today. I'll have so much to catch up on." Only, now I'm thinking also about what effect a quarantine would have on end-of-semester assessment and exams, report-writing, and my planned trip to two of the world's Swine Flu hotspots in less than three weeks' time. Thinking about all that makes me realise: if my school, my life, is hit by the disease, it won't be up to me to decide what I can and can't afford to miss. Everyone's lives will be rearranged dramatically, if only for a time.
I doubt that Swine Flu says anything special about the decadence of our society today - certainly nothing more than you can tell from watching Video Hits on a Saturday morning, or looking at the glossies at the Supermarket checkout. But it says something less than ideal when a society can't afford to get sick. It suggests, I think, a bad case of priorities out of order.
I'm going to have a sleep this afternoon, and hope to rearrange some priorities before I go back to work tomorrow.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Worthy causes
The past week has seen me back in my old stomping ground of Carlton a fair bit. It's always an interesting experience returning, feeling at once just I've never left and like it's years since my life revolved around that place.
One of the more awkward aspects of city life that I am always reminded of when I go back is the very challenging question of when to give money to beggars - and they abound on Lygon St, particularly outside Lygon Court. I never worked out a consistent strategy to adopt when I lived there, and am no more consistent when I go back. On Tuesday night, going to the Nova to watch a film with my old housemate from the latter Carlton days, we were approached by someone asking for money to get him and his uncle somewhere. My friend obliged with some small change, and so I felt like I might as well. I only had about $1.50, plus a few 5 and 10 cent pieces, so I got out the $1 and the 50 cents and handed it over - only, we were standing just over a drain and, much to our collective horror, the $1 fell out of my fingers and through the grate. The man stood over the drain, looking in and saying, "Is there any way of getting it out?" I didn't really know what to do - I only had what I had already dismissed as worthless shrapnel left in my wallet, which I instantly took out and gave to him as some means of making amends. The larger notes in my wallet seemed too much to give him as well - why, I wonder? Was I playing it safe, and figuring that he could hardly do much damage to himself with only 70 cents, whereas $20...well, who knew what he might do?
What stood out for me most from the whole experience was that I wouldn't miss that dollar coin that was now circulating somewhere in Carlton's sewerage system. I had parted with it because it didn't mean a lot to me, and so I was no worse off. To that man, though, the dollar was worth enough that he even contemplated climbing into the drain to get it. Speech of Arrested Development had it right, I suppose, when he said, "Two dollars is a snack to me, but it means a big deal to you." Pity "Mr Wendall" hasn't dated very well. The social message was probably once very profound.
Then, last night, I sat outside Vina Bar, sadly soon to be closed down, with some friends from my book group, when we were approached by a girl, probably about twelve years old, who was selling handmade friendship bands. We declined her offer without much thought. I wondered as she passed what she was selling them for. I had no use for a friendship band, but would probably give her money for one if it was for a good cause. One of my friends must have had the same idea, calling the girl back to ask what she was raising money for. The girl's answer was that she was trying to buy all the "Twilight" merchandise. I tried to hold back my amusement while a couple of my friends engaged her in conversation about "Twilight" and why it was important to her. The girl was delighted, clearly, to share her love of the books, and her hopes for the movie, just released on DVD - and, I must admit, while my snobbery made me feel that this was in no way a worthy cause, I suspect my friends had the better response to talk to her about it, and to make a gutsy twelve-year-old girl feel a bit more comfortable walking alone on Lygon Street on a Saturday night.
The lines to guide us in situations like this are fairly thin. If we aren't responding with love, we make every cause worthless. With love - even the most worthless of causes can gain some purpose.
One of the more awkward aspects of city life that I am always reminded of when I go back is the very challenging question of when to give money to beggars - and they abound on Lygon St, particularly outside Lygon Court. I never worked out a consistent strategy to adopt when I lived there, and am no more consistent when I go back. On Tuesday night, going to the Nova to watch a film with my old housemate from the latter Carlton days, we were approached by someone asking for money to get him and his uncle somewhere. My friend obliged with some small change, and so I felt like I might as well. I only had about $1.50, plus a few 5 and 10 cent pieces, so I got out the $1 and the 50 cents and handed it over - only, we were standing just over a drain and, much to our collective horror, the $1 fell out of my fingers and through the grate. The man stood over the drain, looking in and saying, "Is there any way of getting it out?" I didn't really know what to do - I only had what I had already dismissed as worthless shrapnel left in my wallet, which I instantly took out and gave to him as some means of making amends. The larger notes in my wallet seemed too much to give him as well - why, I wonder? Was I playing it safe, and figuring that he could hardly do much damage to himself with only 70 cents, whereas $20...well, who knew what he might do?
What stood out for me most from the whole experience was that I wouldn't miss that dollar coin that was now circulating somewhere in Carlton's sewerage system. I had parted with it because it didn't mean a lot to me, and so I was no worse off. To that man, though, the dollar was worth enough that he even contemplated climbing into the drain to get it. Speech of Arrested Development had it right, I suppose, when he said, "Two dollars is a snack to me, but it means a big deal to you." Pity "Mr Wendall" hasn't dated very well. The social message was probably once very profound.
Then, last night, I sat outside Vina Bar, sadly soon to be closed down, with some friends from my book group, when we were approached by a girl, probably about twelve years old, who was selling handmade friendship bands. We declined her offer without much thought. I wondered as she passed what she was selling them for. I had no use for a friendship band, but would probably give her money for one if it was for a good cause. One of my friends must have had the same idea, calling the girl back to ask what she was raising money for. The girl's answer was that she was trying to buy all the "Twilight" merchandise. I tried to hold back my amusement while a couple of my friends engaged her in conversation about "Twilight" and why it was important to her. The girl was delighted, clearly, to share her love of the books, and her hopes for the movie, just released on DVD - and, I must admit, while my snobbery made me feel that this was in no way a worthy cause, I suspect my friends had the better response to talk to her about it, and to make a gutsy twelve-year-old girl feel a bit more comfortable walking alone on Lygon Street on a Saturday night.
The lines to guide us in situations like this are fairly thin. If we aren't responding with love, we make every cause worthless. With love - even the most worthless of causes can gain some purpose.
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