Two birds, one stone
Topic: Illustrated
I recently found out about Friday catblogging, an odd little blog tradition in which blog authors devote one post on Fridays to a picture of and a short story or reflection about their cat. Bizarre. I wanna join the club! However, I have no fuzzy things living in my flat, unless something in the refrigerator has gone off. But as I have no desire launch Friday mouldblogging - if only so that Mom doesn't worry any more than she already does about my housekeeping, my eating habits, and the general state of my health - I won't go there.

I also realized that I've been spending more time writing about news and stuff I've found on the web than I have life in Melbourne, which is presumably what you, my devoted audience, are most interested in. So I thought I should incorporate that, and photos, into a regular Friday feature. I have no idea what to call it, because presumably as the semester progresses, it's going to difficult to sustain something that requires me to leave the flat to take a picture of something, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if you're subjected to at least one semi-coherent synopsis of whatever particularly bewildering bit of theory I'm wrestling with at the moment, accompanied by a photo of the stack of books on the topic that I've checked out of the library but not yet opened. Looking forward to that, aren't you?

But the semester doesn't start until next week, so this Friday you get Brunswick graffitiblogging:

Seeing this picture was one of the things that persuaded me to take my flat. The day that I saw my flat, I had already walked past three buildings with locations I didn't like, and had been in two other flats that were just appalling. I had begun to think that I wasn't going to find anything suitable that I could afford. But that afternoon, as I walked up Sydney Road, which is populated with shops ranging from thrift stores to high-end boutiques, and restaurants that run from fast food/take-away on up to reasonably swank places, with a strong emphasis on foods from the Greek/Turkish/Middle Eastern family, I began to have a hopeful feeling about the place I was on my way to see. I turned onto my street, and immediately fell in love with this bit of graffiti.

Just a few minutes later, I was being shown around my flat, in as much as there's any 'around' to be shown in a wee little studio that's smaller than the front room of my apartment in Baltimore. Although, to be fair, that front room was huge, so this place only suffers by comparison. It's plenty of room for me. Most importantly, it was clean and bright, and housed in a very well-maintained building with the most immaculate shared laundry I've ever seen. Fresh from my visits to a flat that reeked of mildew and the grungy 'villa' unit with neighbors who had insanely kitschy taste in porch decorations, I jumped at the chance to take this flat.

Part of the appeal of this graffiti is the ambiguity of the message. Another part is the reminder to slow down. My neighborhood is wonderful to stroll through in the summertime. Most of the homes have lovely little front gardens. Roses are very popular, as are fruit trees - lemon, orange, peach, and an odd-looking one that I think may be persimmon. Walking down my street as summer turned to fall, I saw for the first time how beautiful olives are as they ripen. The first sign is a soft purple blush at the bottom of the fruit, which gradually deepens and spreads toward the stem. Half-ripened olives look like they're slowly soaking up color. Its nice to have a reminder, as I walk away from the tram stop, that its good to take my time walking home to look for little things like ripening olives.