Category: the daily column

I’m in the middle of an experiment right now: writing real letters. It all came about because of a movie which featured letters prominently as a plot device, and the discussion that followed in my family about how letters used to be the only way to communicate across distances. Telephones reduced that, and email has virtually eliminated the need to send a letter which is not business related.

I left that in my ideas drawer for a bit, noting it as something to perhaps come back to in the future. (I don’t actually have an “ideas drawer”, it’s more the abstract concept.) A few weeks ago, I picked up the book White Mughals, which is about the East India Company and its rise in the late Mughal era of India – nicely historical, engagingly written book. I noticed that the primary sources for so much of the writer’s information was letters (other sources like journals also cropped up). That got me thinking… what would the historians 200 years from now scour over? Google’s old decaying datacentre hard-drives? An Archive.org that was bigger than the ‘operating net’ itself? History rarely records the emepheral things such as conversations, and one could say quite easily that emails etc are just digitized conversations, not letters in the same sense they were 200 years ago.

So I hit upon an idea: why don’t I do some letter writing? =) I’d send it to some friends, see if I got a reply, and if things got interesting we’d have a bit of a correspondence going.

It would be conceited of me to say that I want these letters to preserve somehow a snapshot of life as it is now, and that perhaps a book would be written in the future on the basis of my letters. It is far more likely that the net will endure, in some form, and that this blog or my emails are more likely to survive in the great archive, to be indexed and searched and cross referenced by increasingly smarter programs. But, well, there was a bit of a novelty to the idea of writing letters – something which perhaps 10 years ago would have been considered far more normal.

I don’t even know how to write a letter in the conventions of those who’ve gone before – I know how to write a super-serious business-related letter, and I can recall some conventions when writing a letter to relatives, but that always felt a little too formal, a little too serious. I tend to write my letters as I would emails, albeit longer and more stream-of-concious because I can’t go back and edit them like I could a long email. I’m using the techniques of writing double-spaced I learnt so well in year 12 because my handwriting was atrocious, and hasn’t really gotten better the more I’ve used computers nearly exclusively to write things. Occasionally even I can’t decipher my own writing, which is kinda tragic.

So, perhaps expect a letter from me, or at least a message asking for your address =)

Update: Writing letters takes much longer than I thought it would.

There’s a few people you can never replace in your life, but right at the top of that list is your mum. Without whom you wouldn’t actually be around, so right off the bat there’s something you can’t argue against.

Some will argue that having one “special” day set aside for mothers demeans the whole thing, that actually having that day is an acknowledgement that most of the time mothers go unappreciated. There’s some who argue that it’s crass & commercialised and that decaring this day of all days is completely arbitrary – mainly because the shops haven’t got anything else to get sales in May. To which I say that’s the weakest excuse I’ve ever heard, foo’.

Mother’s Day may indeed be rather arbitrary, and an acknowledgement of those underappreciated, but the counter argument would be to use this day to make up for your own shortcomings. You may argue with your mum, you may find her old fashioned and restrictive and overbearing and all those other things that inevitably gets pointed at parents, but if there’s one person in the world who’ll care for you when all else have left you, it’s your mum.

I can’t be with my mum this Mother’s Day, but I sure hope you did something today. Something as small as telling her: I love you, mum.

My graduation is on the 25th, at 4:00. I’ll be getting my academic dress-thingy before, around 2ish.

Ok people, let’s not screw it up this time. I’m giving you nearly 2 weeks of warning now. I’d like to meet up with as many peeps as I can, and at uni wouldn’t be a bad place to do it. I know you’ve all got timetables and it’s the end of semester & all that, but I’ll be down for four days (25th-28th), which is ample time to meet up. Last time there was the whole long weekend thing, but there’s little excuse this time not to take at least an hour out or something – I propose lunch on Friday or something, subject of course to everyone’s availablity. So far, it looks like Saturday night is booked out one way or another, and obviously Thursday is mostly occupied with the whole peice of paper thing.

Work with me here.

I’ve got a list of things as long as my arm to do and only so much time to do it in; when you’re at work, it’s hard to find the time to call up the motor registry and the car insurance company and the post office and the health insurance company. Why are these things only open during business hours? everyone’s working at that time!

I for one love Indian call centres. They’re open outside our business hours, and the people get my name right. If all call centres were in India, I could do the calls I need to when I had time, and I’d never get a parcel sent to Karen again. (“Yes, that parcel’s for me… No, I’m Karan, not Karen… I’m sorry, do you want a statutory declaration or something?” sheeze).

i.e. on a hectic roundabout of things to do and much too little time to find something interesting to blog about. Will put something down about E3 and the Playboxstation Wii60 circus on the weekend. In the meantime, bananas. or possibly grapefruit.

I’m sitting and wondering this morning what on earth I did during Internet 1.0 (i.e. before it was fashionable to call it Web, and give it a version number). I can recall fansites dedicated to Buffy, my very own Geocities account, random flash games and ad-overkill Yahoo!Mail, but that all seems a little… well, lacking.

Do tell, what was the net for you before blogs & bit torrent, before gmail, googlepages and flickr?

Oh crap, I’m late I’m late I hate CityRail I’m late, I thought as I ran from Circular Quay to the Conservatorium of Music. The time was 4:01, the concert scheduled to start a minute ago. I’d never even seen the Conservatorium before, let alone knew where the entry was. Going on a map, a wing and a bit of a prayer, I managed to find it, and apparently… I wasn’t late. Or at the very least, everyone was late. No actual performance started until 4:15, by which time I was seated and reasonably aware of the fact that if you took hair colour as a reasonable measure of origin, 90% of the audience was Asian. Not altogether surprising, but a fact that did make me amused. Continue reading “Piano Stories”

A couple, probably well into their 60s, if not their 70s. They’re both reading a single broadsheet paper, different parts, each holding their side up with the “outer” hand. In the middle, their hands are clasped lovingly together, assuring each other they are still here, still committed to their relationship, to each other.

My cynicism took a break for that half hour.

Just thought I’d note my next two scheduled visits to Melbourne – 14-17th April (easter weekend), and then 25th – (probably) 28th May for my graduation (which is on the 25th, a nice Thursday afternoon that throws out any chance of me returning to work the next day or turning up for work that day). That’s probably going to be it for a while as in winter I’d prefer to get people to come up here where it’s marginally warmer =P

Things are totally settled now, I’ve run down my list of obligated-to-visit people, I don’t have any pressing items that need to be bought and there’s not a whole lot going down to distract me.

Right.

Looking around the house, I realise that perhaps I’ve been neglecting something. Namely neatness. There’s a pile of dishes in the sink, the laundry basket is kind of full – but more tellingly there’s shirts scattered all over my room and they don’t look like they were artfully placed there. There’s dust bunnies accumulated in the empty rooms. Shoes really need a polish. The single plant I have, a shoot of bamboo, is sitting in mostly green water. The grass outside needs cutting before it starts to gets rampant. There’s leaf-litter everywhere from the big stupid gumnut tree right out front. The study room looks like a literary bomb hit it, with books and magazines strewn about the place. Things generally need to be straightened out.

While nothing has gotten truly unhygenic, it’s the kind of mess that’s easily sustainable without any particular effort what so ever, and it’s not conducive to day to day living. So today is cleaning day designate. I’d call it spring cleaning, except it’s not spring, it’s Autumn. It’s more get-your-act-together cleaning. Time to roll up them sleeves and get to it.

6:45 – Alarm goes off. I reach out and switch it to the radio.

7:04 – Swear, get out of bed. Do the whole morning thing.

7:59 – Start breakfast while watching Sunrise for weather & news. Out the door by 8:09.

8:16 – At station waiting for 8:24 express to city.

9:15 – Log in to computers, read overnight email from London & NY. Catch up on bloglines.

9:45 – Start looking at work. Synchronise with overnight work from others, move into “work” mode

10:40ish – Get up, stretch, fill waterbottle, have small snack (still very much in the ‘Recess’ mindset).

12:23 – Update blog

12:56 – Leave desk for lunch

1:05 – Pay exorbitant price for sushi box, thinking “Hey, I haven’t sushi in a while…”

1:21 – Try to remember why it was so long between ordering sushi box for lunch. Ah, that’s right, because it doesn’t half fill me up.

1:24 – Order garlic bread/toast type thing. Walk away satisfied with salty, garlicy, buttery goodness.

1:34 – decide not much interested in sitting by the harbour with seagulls swooping all around me and return to work.

1:39 – Update blog.

3:15 – “Happy Hour” coffee, $1, not brilliant but does the job.

4:35 – crack Stupid Bug which has been occupying my time for the last day or so. Celebrate.

5:30 – Weekly update meeting thing. Realise there’s a lot of stuff to do yet.

6:10 – Update blog. Leave for home.

7:17 – Arrive home, consider what to cook.

7:25 – Reheat leftovers from the weekend. Suppress stomach growls while waiting for microwave with orange juice.

7:34 – Switch on Channel 10 for new show “Thank God you’re here”. I think it’s pretty funny actually, despite some slow moments. Improv is always funny for the fact that it’s so random.

8:36 – Switch between Spicks and Specks, House and The Movie Show (SBS). I eventually settle on Spicks and Specks because I feel like a laugh tonight.

9:04 – bored with house, I go sit on the net for a bit, catching up on forums and downloads.

9:31 – Go back to the TV to watch The Glass House.

9:37 – Remember I have to iron a shirt for tomorrow.

10:07 – pull out sofabed to have a lie down while watching At The Movies, since I didn’t end up watching The Movie Show. Always liked David & Margret better anyway.

1:22 (am) – wake up on the sofa bed, the sounds of the TV having intruded into my dreams. Groggily turn off TV, computer, lights, hit the bed.

End of Day.