As Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, a new and frustrating biography by Willard Sterne Randall, shows, Allen is hard to write about. He poses a challenge not so much because he is different from more famous Founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin but because he resembles them perhaps a bit too much—in ways most Americans prefer not to think about.

…

Indeed, who wasn’t a land speculator in this freewheeling age? George Washington, a former surveyor, had amassed thousands of acres in the Ohio valley and spent 10 years lobbying the governor of Virginia to legalize his titles. Gen. Thomas Gage, who would lead British forces against Washington, held 18,000 acres, and had married into one of the greatest landowning families on the continent. When fighting broke out in 1775, these contested speculations loomed in the background.

If Allen had one thing in greater quantities than courage and verve, it was good timing. In the spring of 1775, just as officials were planning to arrest Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, a far greater insurrection broke out in Boston. Had the imperial crisis not come to a head just then, Allen would surely have been captured and executed.

and, alluding to the religious context of the time, the article makes mention of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, a text by one of the Founding Fathers that explicitly attacks Christianity in its then-modern form, along with straight-out calling the Bible just another book. Imagine someone on the level of the US President saying that these days – it’d cause apoplexies across the US and be liable to see him impeached before the week was through!

Fascinating that the US has warped into the strange country with conflicting drives that exists today.

I told Kirsty I’d tell these stories one day, so here they are.

The first

My first – proper – crush was ‘A’, and she didn’t look at me at all; I adored her for all the wrong, infantile reasons. We would have conversations which I would take away, manipulate and make myself feel good about things, and pretend like there was something reciprocal there.

Hah, what a lie. She crushed any such ideas swiftly, and I haven’t spoken to her in years. I got over it quick. Looking back now, it’s very much a “what were you thinking?” feeling.

She taught me to recognise shallowness, and that I should avoid it like the plague.

The second

My second crush was also ‘A’ (but a different ‘A’ to the one before, naturally). She was as cute as a button, and I assumed that her ever-smiling face was her, and that it was all very chill. It was a time at which I could devote my time to obsessing over these things, and so I did.

I think I was probably even more of a fool this time – I took a small sample of her life and thought it was all I needed to know. I proved myself to be a bit of an ass at best, immature as before but only slightly wiser for it.

Eventually, it was all patched over. To this day however, if she turned to me and said “yes”, I’d gladly drop all else; she does stay that special to me.

She taught me not to assume or to obsess; it was a proper lesson, and one I bear in mind today.

The third

The third came some time later – I’d let things lie for a year and more, and while there were occasional infatuations, nothing quite blew out to a full blown crush. Until ‘B’ (no, I’m not trying to go through the alphabet; she’d be ‘R’ actually, but I always preferred ‘B’). This time, I was a lot more mature about things, or at least I told myself.

Every time I said her name, it’s like I could smell her close again. Mature? hah.

Maybe if I’d let things cruise as they were, slowly and inexorably, it would have played out differently. I made the mistake of impatience, of wanting to force the issue, and in the most amateurish way – almost by textbook. I was so nervous it felt like my stomach was shrinking into a black hole. On the surface, I played it cool (I heard my voice crack; “oh the folly!” my inner voice screamed), but afterwards I berated myself for moving so early.

We stayed friends, but somehow found ourselves drifting apart. I’d still gladly accompany her to the ends of the earth, but only because I know it’d be an adventure in her company.

She taught me how to open up and just be – it wasn’t a lesson learnt at the end, but rather continuously in her presence, and the reason that lay behind why I wanted to stay with her forever.

The fourth

The fourth came amidst so many other things that it almost snuck up on me, as I realised that hang on, I really did feel something here. ‘E’ was … complex. Far more so than nearly any I’d encountered, in so many ways, and she was open about things too. I felt so comfortable, I wondered what might have happened in an alternative life.

We talked and talked and talked; the sun rose and the sun set and we had not a care for the hands of the clock, nor the demands of the world. We debated life and the actions of humans from a personal perspective to the global views. I was almost afraid she would bore of me and move on, leaving me in the lurch.

I never told her. I took the safe bet, to keep silent, and subsumed any feeling for the longer term goal; our continued friendship was something far more valuable.

She may know, she may not; this, indeed, may tell her clear. Perhaps time cleanses things, because now, I don’t have that same sheer intensity of feeling. I would gladly oblige her anything, if only to see her all-too-rare smile, to hear her crack another joke and we can laugh together to hold back the flood.

Her lesson to me? Patience.

The others

Sure, there are and were others; ‘C’, ‘F’, ‘K’, ‘C’ again, ‘M’, ‘L’, ‘H’, ‘J’, ‘E’ again, ‘F’ again, ‘O’, ‘N’, ‘E’ again, ‘R’, even ‘T’, some might say; each, perhaps more infatuation than a serious crush, but each with their own little lesson for me – and all part of life as I know it.

(post 500!)

The first thing I picked up on was that my designs overall have probably been slipping :) Back then, each page, each post was carefully crafted by hand, for without script-enabled hosting, what other method is there? And the other thing was that it wasn’t just a blog, it was a whole personal site, and that’s something that going down the blogging platform path takes away from you, I think. It does make a lot of other things a helluva lot easier (no need to FTP in every update, for one).

Here’s the second design (the first being no design :D) -

I had a splash screen! It was all the rage then, as I recall… Maybe just as I recall. But I like splash screens, dammit. I can’t find my v2 splash screen, but the hit parade below should be a nice little walk through my design history (thumbnails only, mostly for my sake). You may note an anime-ish theme running through the earlier designs.

Through the Glass Darkly

I used image smileys in this one

the dream onion – my first go at poetry (!)

“the freestyle sessions” was the name of blog section

Between the Field and the Sky

Hello iframes!

Did I mention how torturous the writing is on this blog? God, I hope this stuff isn’t preserved in the web archive or somesuch.

In Colour

The iframe had a yellow scrollbar in Internet Explorer

I particularly liked that last one, despite it being all kinds of horrible on the eyes, especially so at night (when I did most of my blogging). It adhered clearly to my principles of expressive design without the need for images to be spliced around. If you can’t design something with just pure HTML/CSS, you’re not really trying =P

occasional coarse language

This one is also one of my favourites

And version 7 (also a fav) was the last of the Mohicans hand-crafted designs. I was off to India at the end of 2003, and I wanted a way to be able to update without having to deal with FTP, and I found a solution. I’d long wanted to play with dynamic web languages (mostly PHP), and WordPress fit the bill (free, fairly hackable, PHP/MySQL). It also let me put a forum up and pretend that my site was some sort of hub for my bunch of friends =) Ah, the innocence of youth.

WordPress was very much in its infancy then, at version 0.72, though it was already growing and showing promise. There was no independent theme structure in those days, so the easiest way I found to plug it into my existing blog was to simply i-frame in the core loop, some straightforward CSS in place to make it all square. It worked seamlessly! =)

More designs followed yet – at the time, I’d been in lockstep with a few others, changing designs every season, and I had to keep the designs flowing. Version 8 can only be described as lazy, with no excuses (“old skool/the official lie”). Version 9, “Codename Eternity” (Winter 04), was an attempt at something vaguely Sci-fi themed.

(The unfortunate part of the early wordpress infrastructure is that themes weren’t seperable from the implementation, and this means that while I have the designs on file, it’d take a bunch of needless effort to try to revive it =P)

Version 10, “Occam’s Razor” (Spring 04), broke the seasonal mould – it continued past spring, mainly because I liked it so much. Initially supposed to be far more concept-based, a revolving door of images along a theme that was easily skinnable. This only happened once, for Christmas – suffice to say, the lack of a digital camera wasn’t helpful.

This came very close to running into the new year.

Version 11, codenamed “I/O” was a non-starter. Between working and hosting issues, my design never progressed beyond some prototype images and I ended up ditching it for Michael Heilmann’s funky new theme, K2, a sterling example of how a theme should be constructed but also an example of how a project can run away on you (development is still on going).

Version 12 was far more pragmatic a redesign, adding a third column of my own design to give a wide-body blog that was moving towards a kottke-esque link blog.

I was halfway through a new design (which would crop up again later, mutated) when Jeremy (friendlygrocer man) told me he was going to change things up, and dropped the hint that if I would care to move on…

Everything was going to be excerpts!

Thus the first rumbling of my own domain started around this point, and thus was the dke project retired for pushing the sky.

*ahem* Let’s structure this. And let you in on what I’m doing – no deletes in this post, just restatements. You get to see my thought process. Which obviously isn’t as structured as this, because I added this after writing some lines below. That are after the cut.

Sydney, and Moving Out

If we want to work it through in chronological order, I guess Sydney comes first. Moving up here wasn’t so much a step out as a step back. But not in a bad way. Argh. Let’s start that again.

Sydney is a place you literally have to experience yourself if you ever consider it. Does that make sense? I don’t know. Sydney can only be absorbed properly by living in the place for a bit. I guess that’s true of all cities, but some cities take longer, and Sydney is one of them. I first moved [back] here [because this was where we landed after coming from India] 10 years ago after year 6, and 10 years later [(or 15 years later, if you want to measure it from when we first got here)] I find myself back here, after university. I like moving because it lets you get the feeling you just hit refresh on life, and while you might not reload exactly where you were, it’s a way of cleaning some cruft out. Terrible metaphor. Before this move, I’d always been glad to move for the possibilities it offerred (I can’t spell, seriously. How do you spell ‘offerred’? I know it’s a word), but this time I sort of knew where I was going and what I was getting into.

Only, I didn’t. I was moving out.

Huge. Big step. Life affirming. Lesson teaching. Way to Go. You learn things about yourself (e.g. your natural tendancies) you don’t while living at home. You appreciate the effort required. You appreciate the simple cost of things. It’s the human equivalent of leaving the nest, cave, pouch, insert appropriate young-leaving-parents animal metaphor here. If you can’t flap those wings, you fall. If you can’t get that food, you starve. If you can’t do everything that you need to keep going, you stop, or go backwards. It’s harder than it looks. But at the same time, if you’ve got enough grounding, you’ll be just fine – I know I am. Sure there are whole weeks where nothing gets done around the house, but in the end it still comes up smelling of roses – because it has to, because I’m living here and it’s mine, y’know?

Don’t kid yourself. Move out. Move to a totally different city, town, country, just somewhere far enough that you don’t have a safety net anymore. You’ll learn right quick, and you’ll love it.

Anyway, Sydney: cool. Love the weather, in case I haven’t mentioned that enough already. Traffic & roads suck, restaurants have turned up a little below scratch, but by and large I’m content. It takes time to build up a peergroup, a sense of mates, but that too shall come to pass. Which brings me to my next topic.

Working

Why’s that, you ask? Because Work redfines everything. It opens possibilities, doors and whatnot, but at the same time, it limits your choices. Watch out.

(I’m blogging about work, I know, but I’m talking generalities here. Please don’t fire me)

At uni, you get to explore as many aspects of your personality as you choose to take advantage of (so my hint is: take advantage of it while you can). You get to meet people from a variety of backgrounds in a variety of fields with a variety of interests, and if your interests happen to intersect chances are you’ll see them again and develop friendships. Take advantage of this, too. You will find in the workforce that you are suddenly surrounded by people who have a similiar skill set to yours, and occasionally even coinciding interests.

But. You will see these people every day, regardless of whether you like them or net not, whether your interests coincide, whether you choose to spend more time in their company or not. This can be a good thing if you happen to find yourself surrounded by people who you can click with and can easily spend the rest of your life with, but if you don’t have that, you’re stuffed. Well, if you don’t have anything to fall back on from there, you’re stuffed. You won’t find time or opportunity to really develop new friendships (unless you’re really dedicated) outside the workplace. Life suddenly is a lot more predictable. Again, some people find that a good thing. I don’t like it nearly so much (probably why I enjoy moving so much).

To look once more at the topic of my work itself: I’m a developer. I’m working on reasonably advanced software, and being in a bank it’s fairly easy to predict the product domain. I’m trying to avoid being a corporate clone. I don’t have to wear a tie to work, and I typically work 9~6, with an hour or so for lunch. With the commute factored in it’s 8-7. I cook my own dinner when I get home, and about once a week my own lunch. I am very much enjoying earning money & managing it because it gives me a sense of actual usefulness of my time. I’ve been given a couple of responsibilities at work, and while I enjoy the challenge, some days it is quite daunting to think that I have been given this much responsibility this early in my life – and I’m much younger by far than the other graduates, which is both a blessing and a curse. I work with a good team, and I still get that insane sense of satisfaction whenever the work acheives something tangible – and the corresponding lows when things are going haywire and/or rapidly downhill.

One thing I find about my particular stream of work is that… well, you have to wonder to some extent how is it that it’s worth the money they’re paying me? It’s a long way from me to the primary producer who ends up putting food on my plate. How is it that the brain cycles I actively engage in this “programming” I do daily actually acheives something to make food appear? I understand in the abstract sense that money flows around and all that, but you still have to wonder ask yourself occasionally… what is it about the work you do every day, that adds value to the world, in a way that the world returns the favour?

I think I’ll just leave it on that half-expressed contemplative note.

Before

Moving down from Sydney was a very reluctant thing for me. I’d got things fairly set in Sydney, with a good bunch of friends, and even if I was going to be moving schools regardless, I’d still be close to those people I stuck with since year 7. Moving is never easy for the very reasons it is exciting; in essence, your whole life is renewed with new opportunity. I managed to get into a good school in Melbourne, and if I didn’t know anyone there or indeed practically anything about the city before, it wasn’t so much of an issue. When you’re a 15 year old, you don’t have too much control over your life, and I like to think I do my best to make the best of a situation.

Year 11

Year 11 was always going to be hard, no matter how you approached it. It was harder yet for the fact of moving states and schools, and I started the first day rather lonely. I think the first week my bemusement at blazers, lockers and ties overrode any sense of lacking people to be around. Stepping from a suburban school into one in the city, catching a tram in to school, it was all a huge change, and I formed some quick friendships with the other people who joined with me – some 30 or so people, an unusually large group. There were friendships of convenience and coincidence. Those never last, and it was probably somewhere in the second term that I wandered into the Anime club, a true novelty for me.

Everyone finds their niche eventually; I think I found mine somewhere around there, and got involved simply because of the fact that there wasn’t much else that drew my interest. I’d previously played basketball or handball all recess and lunch, but here they were serious, and I was an outsider. It’s easier for an outsider to drop into a group of outliers than it is to get into a group that is concretely established, and so it was that the anime club drew me in. I think it was out of this that the majority of my current friendships have developed, however awkwardly, and inevitably I am thankful.

Getting used to a different school system was hard – especially at first when your assumed knowledge must be adapted. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The school did make things as easy as possible though, which is a good thing. Didn’t have much of a social life then, but it’s part of the process I guess, and certainly the great white elephant of the final two years of school didn’t help it along much. Somewhere in there though, I did start to emerge and become more social…

Oh and by way of world events, September 11 redefined everything in the public. Coming as it did 3 days after my 16th birthday, I found it very interesting to observe how we developed from kids talking about the latest game console and whether Ford really did kick Holden’s ass or not to having fully formed views on world politics. I think it’s a change which is by and large positive, but kids these days do grow up and become aware so much faster than we ever did. Someday perhaps we will cherish that innocence lost.

Year 12

This is where I really struck my groove – I’d settled, I knew the place, I had the people, and you might say that things were good.

Then I discovered girls. And coffee.
Yes, kinda late you might say. 16 however is a good enough time. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know about the fairer sex before that, but it’s not exactly at the top of your mind at a boys school, and conversing requires first that you be a bit social. I took it entirely in my stride, however, letting the lead provided by books and movies guide me through the maze that it is, and suddenly I’d realised I’d left the shy side of me behind. Don’t get me wrong – I still shy up at the best of times – but somehow I found my ability to talk develop beyond the daily inanities. I had an Opinion, and I had a Voice, and I let it flow, and somehow it was tied up in my ability to successfully engage with the opposite sex. All this played out on the tapestry of year 12.

Coffee was discovered somewhere in the mix, and so will always have this innate association that I need to be drinking it with women.

I think this year – 2002 – was the biggest I’ve had yet. I changed so much between point A at the start of the year and point B at the end, and I cleared the milestones without too many worries altogether. I know there were days which I just wanted to lie down and have it be over, but through the marvel of nostalgia and the innate editing that we all seem to carry, it was a year that I’d live over and over again, and change very little. If there was ever a milestone, a marker for turning points, it was this.

1st Year Uni

Broadly speaking, the rate of change slowed in uni, and 1st through to 3rd year really didn’t contain all that much – but I’m still marking them out seperately for all the events.

2003 started off on an exceptional note, and a cynic might say it was all downhill from there – but of all things, when it comes to looking at these things anyway, I’m no cynic. It really did step up in Uni. I finally found an environment in which I could work at my own pace. I got the course I more or less wanted – I’d have loved to go to Melbourne Uni, but the advantage afforded by the scholarship was clear and so it was to Monash I went. A fork in the road chosen one way that perhaps would have given me more had I chosen the other, but live without regrets and the world is your oyster, really.

In summary, I loved first year uni. We went to India at the end of the year.

2nd Year Uni

2nd year started as more of the same as 1st year, only harder. For the first time, I was worried about my marks, and no amount of bluffing was helping me clear it. Already I have forgotten many of the more difficult things, and this is a bad thing for the value of education. Also, during the holidays I was working practically full time, meaning that it felt a long time between holidays by the time I got to 3rd year.
Surprisingly enough, despite 2nd year bringing changes in personality, and a clear redefinition of friends – as clear as these things get anyway – the year on a whole was pretty unexceptional. Ordinary, even. I made my third and most successful abortive attempt at finding romantic interest, and while I didn’t turn a bitter side up, I certainly put ideas of romance on the backburner, where they’ve stayed ever since. Life winds & weaves though, and who knows where it will end up.

3rd Year Uni

2005 was a big year. It was so long that I practically forgot what happened at the start of the year, because of all of the events that came crashing after. The year started in a rush and really never slowed down. It was final year, after all.

First semester subjects were by and large mostly bleh. 2005 had to be the year with the most late night scrambling to finish assignments – I certainly hope so, because I have no desire to repeat that experience again. Two group projects also put things into perspective. But that wasn’t the big things – Job and Holiday sums it up very nicely.

Final year meant searching for work, and that meant going through the rigmarole of the interview process and everything that entails. My win/loss ratio from first applications is 10 to 1, which as these things are measured is decent enough. Win/loss after interview is 1 to 1, so I think my confidence-bullshitting shines through in face-to-face contact. Fingers crossed I haven’t got myself in past my head with this job. My advice when it comes to interviews? Talk with confidence. They’ll believe you. You just have to get your foot in the door.

And of course there was the holiday. Having saved up a neat little sum, I managed to persuade at least one person, Mr Studds, to accompany me. Going on a trip without the family in the first place was an entirely new experience, and going somewhere other than India was a whole other one. The USA was a blast, meeting so many people with whom I share a tenuous relation (it’s distant, believe me) but somehow can connect with near instantly. And of course putting a face to a name only seen online suddenly made the internet real, made America real. I’m not sure I can believe America really exists, even now, whether it’s all just an elaborate trick or not – but knowing people there, knowing these people get on with their daily lives in the bizzare and mysterious land known as America makes it just that little bit more believable.

Which isn’t even touching on Japan. Even when you are there, it’s a place you’re not entirely sure exists. It’s a country with so many contrasts that you can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to live there every day. The short time I was there, I discovered something else everyday, something to add to the flavour, to give it context. The other thing was that I had gone to the effort of learning the language, and there it was, with the effort validated. Sure, I couldn’t walk down the street and understand everything around me, but I understood enough to work out what I was missing out on, and it filled me with a sense of satisfaction that I accomplished something which had a mundane, everyday existance. It wasn’t something intangible like the creation of a computer program, or something purely mental like being able to recite the first 20 elements and their properties. It was something that could, potentially, be of use, but in an ordinary way. You have to celebrate the little things, really.

The holiday proved to be exactly what I needed. I returned with a new sense of self, a new sense of purpose and a new perspective. All of which I promptly squandered, but I know they’re there, for me to draw on as needed.

And to cap the year, I moved to Sydney. I’d set out from Sydney 5 years earlier saying I’d be back. I’d given up the idea, even got to enjoying Melbourne. But then I found myself on the harbour, a sea breeze in my face and the sun peeking out between clouds, and I realised why I wanted to be back here. Here, I felt free – free to be whatever I could be.

After

Which is not to say I’ll live in Sydney my whole life, or even for the next 5 years – who knows, really? I’ve lived in 3 places in Australia, and each has granted me a different perspective. Ultimately, I have made some of my strongest friendships in Melbourne, and that will keep me coming back regardless of the what happens to the city, as long as my friends are there. Sydney is the place I choose to live though, because for some reason whenever I’m here I feel the closest thing to what one might call being at home. I don’t know why – I’ve lived in Melbourne longer, and longer still in Taree, the little country town. My birth place is thousands of miles away. But for some reason I identify with this place. In Melbourne, I identify with the people. The contexts are seperate, but in an ideal world they’d be the same.

I think it was Shakespeare that said “All the world’s a stage, and we are but players,” and if it wasn’t him, then someone certainly did. This is in effect the closing of one act, and the opening of another – or perhaps merely a change of scene. Time has a way of giving things perspective, but we must remember what it felt like in the moment. Perhaps that is why I write this now, half in Melbourne, half in Sydney, spooling thoughts before they are caught up in matters prosaic.

Certainly has been fun.