Attempting clumsy work-around to STUPID comments problem
Topic: Whatever

Grrr.  Argh.  I'm sick of this comments problem.  And I'm supposed to be writing a philosophy essay.  Yay procrastination!  So, let's see if this inelegant work-around will at least enable people to get their comments published. 

I don't think I can, at this point, preserve all the comments saved under the now-gone-to-crap system that comes with the blog, so I'm just going to have to work with two sets of comments links for the time being.

Let's give this a whirl:

 

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 Click here to comment:postCount('Workaround'); | Click here for trackback: postCountTB('Workaround');

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 Please ignore the comment link below

I'm going to go back there some day
Topic: Whatever
Lots of little reminders about Macedonia have been popping up in my life lately - e-mails from friends I made while I was in Skopje, talking to my brother's girlfriend about their plans to travel in Eastern Europe, and now, this portentously titled series on Yahoo:  'Sacred Mysteries of Macedonia' which I should probably wait to post until I've had time to do more than skim it, but which seems to be reasonably well-researched and generally flattering, which makes me happy.  Some of the pictures are especially lovely - even prettier than my rose-coloured memories.  And it's making me wish for sidewalk table, a grchka salata and glass of T'ga za Jug.  

Wisdom in the bottle
Topic: Whatever
The hot water bottle, that is. It says, 'Forget the soccer. Just put on your fuzzy socks and pajamas and curl up in bed. Isn't having a nice hot water bottle at your feet better than having them stepped on by drunken soccer fans?' What do you say to an argument of such persuasive power?

Dilemma
Topic: Whatever
I am, for the first time, and who knows, possibly the only time, in my life in a country that has a team in the World Cup. I'm not a soccer fan, really, but I do enjoy the World Cup. And I do enjoy me some hoopla and crowd scenes. And there should be plenty of both tonight on Lygon Street for Australia's match against Italy. Big screen TVs set up outdoors, massive crowds, lots of noise and excitement.

Why am I not rushing out the door to partake in the madness? Kickoff is at 1:00 a.m. It's the middle of winter. I'm not sure the public transportation powers that be have really done the best possible planning for an event of this nature -- ergo, I'm not entirely confident in my ability to get home afterwards. As exciting as I know it would be, I find that I'm really not all that enticed by the prospect of shivering in a crowd for several hours, losing sleep, and then maybe having to walk home. Practicality is such a killjoy.

Waiting for my brain to wake up
Topic: Whatever
9:23 a.m., sun streaming directly into my face through the slowly-growing green-and-amber tinted gap in the canopy of the tree outside, mug of dark, sweet tea sending up soft, steamy wisps into the sunlight. Quiet, except for the occasional key taps from me and the person sitting across the room.

Short essay due today in the social theory class - it's not done, I think it's probably total crap, but I've got until 4:00 to attempt to sort something out of it. I was trying to do it last night, but my brain just refused. It was having none of anything academic. Poor brain. I've clearly been asking too much of it lately.

Somebody recently found their way here by googling 'i think i'm going to fail uni'. I don't think I've previously written that precise phrase here, but I am most definitely sympathetic to the sentiment. That can't have been a good night - I'm picturing some distressed first-year student surrounded by indecipherable lecture notes, essays due, no inspiration, freaking out, and suddenly it seems like Google is the only thing to talk to, because Google doesn't judge, it just looks for answers. Yeah, that's a bad night. Hopefully, it's just a bad night, and things look better in the morning -- even if it's just that you realize that failing uni would not actually be the end of everything important in life. It can be entirely too easy to lose sight of that when you're in the thick of study.

9:50 a.m., clouds drifting over the sun, and a current of sound has begun to flow through the hallway outside as staff trickle in. Brain still reluctant to tackle social theory. Time to administer another cup of tea, and perhaps promise it chocolate when the essay is done.

Curiosity satisfied
Topic: Whatever
I have absolutely no idea why this question popped into my head the other day, but I suddenly found myself wondering whether anything akin to the Renaissance Festival happens in Australia. Ampersand Duck just answered that question for me in a post with many entertaining pictures.

Ask, and the internet shall answer, however random the question.

Meme again
Topic: Whatever
I've been sitting staring at this screen, wanting to write something, but not sure what. It seems like there should be something amusing to write about yesterday's experience of doing my taxes entirely myself for the first time in years while my laptop froze, shut down, and generally misbehaved all afternoon, prompting me to threaten it with a beat-down, Office Space-style. With the upcoming holiday, I'm also tempted to wax nostalgic about Easter candy of yore, when sweet things came in small, simple packages, and that was enough for us - no messing around with the sugary gifts of the Easter bunny was necessary (however amusing the results).*

Nothing is working out, though. I hate writer's block. Mercifully, I discovered that I was tagged for the 'four things' meme ages ago, so with apologies to k8teebug for not noticing her tag for so long, I'm going to dust it off and see if it helps with the writer's block at all:

Four jobs I've held:

1. Cashier at Burger King (the job from the seventeenth circle of hell)
2. Late-shift cashier Great Adventure burger stand (the zombie job)
3. Papergirl (the 'I'm never ever starting work at 6 a.m. EVER EVER EVER again' job)
4. Data-entry drone at ETS (the 'I hold your college dreams in my underpaid hands' job)

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. The Company
2. Bend It Like Beckham
3. Spirited Away
4. Ghost World

Four places I've lived:

1. Rome, GA
2. New Egypt, NJ
3. Baltimore, MD
4. Skopje, MK

Four TV shows I like:

1. Sports Night
2. Northern Exposure
3. Family Guy
4. The Amazing Race

Four Family Vacations I've been on:
Family vacations have a tendency to blur together, as most of the ones I recall were either trips from Georgia to New Jersey around the holidays to visit family, or trips that involved staying a camp grounds and visiting Civil War battlefields. I'll do my best to distinguish among them:

1. The time we took the red-eye flight from Atlanta when I was about six and we had the nicest flight attendant ever, apple pancakes for breakfast, and saw the sun rise over the clouds. It wasn't until many years later when I went on my first flight as an adult that I realized what an accomplishment it was for my parents to get three or four children and all the family's luggage on a plane without losing anything or anyone (including their minds and their composure).
2. There was the time we stayed at a campground in Pennsylvania Dutch country and went to the pretzel factory that was on Mr Rogers (one of the coolest episodes, possibly only topped by the one where he met Lou Ferrigno and showed how he got made up to play the Hulk), and the Lititz chocolate factory and the Strasburg Railroad (link has embedded sound) and this old-fashioned ice cream shop in or near Lancaster City that had the most amazing homemade ice cream. I loved that vacation.
3. I can never remember what went with which vacation, but I'm fairly sure there was another trip to Pennsylvania (staying at a campground, again) that might have involved Gettysburg and Hershey Park. Although one of those might actually have been part of the trip above. Or I could be wrong and we packed all of that into one vacation, and this slot should be occupied by one of the short vacations that was basically a few days' trip to a campground with my mom's family, the highlights of which were the campfires and the jockeying among us kids over who would get to sleep in the platform bed over the cab of my grandparent's motor home. But no, now that I think about the pictures from the Pennsylvania vacations, I have short hair in the one in which I'm wearing the Strasburg Railroad cap, and an unfortunate perm (not to mention the acid-washed stretch jeans and bright pink LA Gear high tops) in the one where I'm standing at a Gettysburg monument.
4. My last family vacation was the summer before my senior year of high school, when we combined tours of colleges I was interested in that were in Virginia and southern Maryland with tours of Civil War sites. I think we went to Antietam and Manassas, and I know we went to Appomattox Court House, because I remember thinking how strange it seemed that a war would end in such a lovely, peaceful place.

Four of my favorite fast food dishes:

1. Fried chicken with biscuits (better when homemade, but I'll take what I can get)
2. Hush puppies
3. Chicken cheesesteak (which although only a new-fangled corruption of the sublime original, is still only worth eating in the Philadelphia area.)
4. Thick-cut french fries bought and eaten on the boardwalk

Four sites I visit daily:

1. Bloglines
2. My Yahoo
3. Metafilter
4. Google

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Friends
2. Portland, OR
3. somewhere in the New York-DC corridor (yes I'm a little homesick today)
4. a beach that's sunny, warm, and quiet

Tag: You're it, if you're wandering through the writer's block wasteland, looking for something to post about.


And in case I don't get back here before tomorrow have a happy Easter, or if you don't celebrate Easter, have a happy Eat (or otherwise interact with)-A-Peep Day.


*Credits: Metafilter and Boing Boing

Random bits
Topic: Whatever
Have been having various meetings about tutoring (a tutor in the Australian university system is the equivalent of a T.A. in the American system) over the past couple days - what's involved, what to expect, etc. Glad to get this all sorted this week since the semester starts on Monday. However, I am not worried about the last-minuteness of all this, as I predict that by the end of the semester I will be popularly acclaimed:

(Self-portrait created here, via Jellyfish)

Hung out with the Good Doctors and grandkids after all the meetings were over. It was a low-key evening after the children trundled home - sat around watching TV, which is really about all the mental stimulation I can handle after an afternoon with the kids, energetic little darlings that they are. Mr Dr professed annoyance that the footy pre-season matches are already starting, complaining that 'it's too early for football'. Mrs Dr said she couldn't believe that he'd ever complain about there being too much football. I really must get to a game this season - I feel like if I don't, I'll be missing out on an important part of local culture, given the number and the intensity of footy fans around here - this discussion illustrates just a bit of the madness caused the footy.

Watching the news tonight, I was struck by how normal most of the people on it look. The on-camera talent here has not yet been overrun with the 'plastic people' syndrome so prevalent in the States. It's weird to see newsreaders who aren't coiffed to within an inch of their lives and who appear to have never even considered plastic surgery. Some of them even look as if they might actually dress themselves without the help of a dedicated wardrobe assistant - which isn't to say that they dress badly, necessarily, just that they don't look as if every last item of clothing has been chosen based on how it will appear on camera. I like it, it makes the newsreaders seem like people, not like fabricated approximations of humans that are pulled out of a drawer and propped up in front of the camera every evening at 6:00 and 11:00 to look pretty while reading the teleprompter.

There's a great illustration of how far magazine and publicity pictures push that plastic perfection at FluidEffect (found at Antipixel). Click on 'portfolio' and 'before/after' to see how just how much celebrity and fashion photos can be manipulated before their published. They airbrush people's knees. It's fascinating from a technical perspective (for more of that, see 'composite/manipulation') but it's kind of creepy to see exactly what gets wiped out of people's faces and bodies to create a more slender, youthful look. It's startling how much more personality some of the unretouched photographs show. If it wasn't so late I might be tempted into a rant about the ridiculousness of a media culture that's so youth-obsessed that it promotes the airbrushing out of smile lines (really, is there anything more attractive?), but it's not as if I'll lack future opportunities to be prompted to write that post.

Everybody needs a logo
Topic: Whatever

How funny is it that I found my brand identity in a political discussion?

Rain, for the love of god!
Topic: Whatever
We've been sweltering here for days now. I woke up sweating. Started sweating as soon as I got out of the shower. Never really stopped sweating until I finally got settled in the movie theater early this evening. Thought I heard someone in the queue at the theater say that they'd heard it had gotten up to 46 in the city. The prediction was for 41, which is about 105 degrees, for those of you operating in Fahrenheit. Personally, after it hits about 32/90, I figure the exact temperature doesn't matter, because its too damn hot to care about fine distinctions.

Fortunately, I left the theater to strong breeze, heavy skies, and a noticeably reduced air temperature. Unfortunately, this fortuitous change in the weather had made very little difference to the temperature in my apartment, which is still giving off all the heat it sucked up this afternoon. We need a storm in the worst way - thunder, lightning, howling winds slamming raining against windows - and though it has cooled down, there's barely a breeze at the moment. Feh. I cannot face another night of lying down to sleep to find my sheets radiating heat.

Anyway, I know you're itching to hear about the movie I went to see to escape roasting and/or dessication. I saw The Constant Gardener, which I've been debating seeing for at least a month. I'm not usually much for thrillers, but I was intrigued by what I had been hearing and reading about the film, and it was pretty much the only thing playing in the right time slot.

I'm glad that I ended up seeing The Constant Gardener, although I was in the mood for a more frivolous diversion than this film offers. It tells the story of Justin (Ralph Fiennes), a British expatriate in Kenya who works for the British government's aid department, his activist wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), and the sordid story of corruption that he unravels as he learns about the circumstances surrounding her death.

One thing that the film does well is interweave human relationships and emotions with its grander themes. Justin's investigation of Tessa's death is driven by the tension between his love for her and his uncertainty about her love for him. Fiennes's performance is beautifully believeable, and Weisz is, for the most part, an excellent counterpart to him, although I couldn't understand why they were trying to pass her off as a 24-year-old. I found that she has far too much gravity to be believeable as a character that young.

There are some other things that the film doesn't quite get right, or explain enough. Like what caused a mild-mannered career diplomat from a foreign service family to marry a much younger woman with an intense commitment to her ideals and an uncomfortably confronting style. Fiennes and Weisz are absolutely believeable as lovers, but I'm still not convinced that it works for the character of Justin. Actually, I'm not entirely sure that 'diplomat' is the right word to describe Justin's role - I'm not familiar with the way the British system operates, but I don't think I would refer to a comparable position in the American system as a diplomatic one.

I struggled as well with the way that Kenya and the Sudan, and the local people of those places are portrayed. Basically, they serve as a backdrop to action that centers around the expatriate community. None of the black African characters are anywhere near as fully developed as the white British characters. Ultimately, though, I think that this technique works, whether it was intentional or not, because the point of the movie, basically, is that to the rest of the world, Africa doesn't matter. It's a cipher that has significance only to the extent that it can be exploited, literally and symbolically, by 'greater' powers. The mere fact that 'Africa' is considered acceptable shorthand for the setting of the movie - an entire continent, with all the social, political and geographic diversity that implies - indicates how readily most people are willing to oversimplify or ignore the continent.

However, as a significant point in its favor, the film is not disrespectful of its African settings or the people who populate them. For example, there is never a hint of an attitude that all Kenyans are alike or indistinguishable, which sadly cannot be said for many Hollywood products. Smaller players are singled out as individuals and interact with major characters in surprisingly rich ways. There are moments when a wealth of backstory is conveyed in a brief conversation or an exchange of glances.

Perhaps what surprised me the most was that a movie that has recognizable stars and a not-insignificant budget would grapple even reasonably effectively with issues affecting modern African countries and with a very complex, mature range of human emotions and relationships. It was a pleasant surprise to find that The Constant Gardener makes demands on its audience, not the least of which is attention to it's non-linear narrative structure, but more importantly, the demand it makes that you think about what you do and don't know about what goes on outside of your neighborhood.