When bathroom grafitti meets a culture of attribution
Topic: Illustrated
Just a bit of the reading material scattered across the loo walls on campus.

The first week of classes is over, and it went pretty well. Tuesdays are going to be a bit rough because I start at 9:00 and don't finish until 7:15, but both of that day's classes (Gender & Colonialism and Social Impact Assessment) seem like they're going to be good. Then I've got evening classes on Wednesday (Gender, Globalization and Development) and Thursday (International Feminist Political Thought) as well. So it felt like a pretty long week by the time I finished on Thursday. But its good to have a reason to get out of bed and out of my flat on a regular basis. I was actually getting bored with being lazy. Who knew that was possible?

Just a little crazy
Topic: Raving
I was looking at some pictures that Mike Doughty posted from an outdoor gig he played in Boston recently, which reminded me that I missed Artscape in Baltimore this weekend, and I suddenly felt the strangeness of living through winter* in July. Even more strangely, I felt a deep craving for an East Coast summer.

I want to walk out my door and into a wall of hot, heavy air that sticks to my skin. I want to wonder why it is that humidity weighs down my clothes, yet impels my hair to wander far and wide from whatever style I've attempted to train it into. I want to need no excuse for lying around all day, because everybody recognizes that its just too hot to move. I want it to be summer, and I want it to be the summer I know, not the summer here that I briefly experienced when I first arrived, all dry heat and intense glare.

I remember the many little miseries of city summers. I lived through a bad one the summer after college, in a sub-let studio apartment with no air conditioner. I remember lying absolutely still in my bed night with the fan blowing directly across me, hoping I'd fall asleep before I felt the need to turn my pillow over again in a fruitless quest to find a cool spot. I remember wanting it just to be cool enough that I wouldn't start sweating as soon as I turned off the water in the shower. I remember that, when the wind did blow, it only brought in the smell of tar from the roof. And yet the summer that I love is the summer that feels like a sauna and smells like things that haven't been properly dry for days, and right now, as crazy as it sounds, I'm envying all of you who are having that summer.



*This must be qualified with the disclaimer that the season referred to as "winter" in Melbourne would barely pass muster as late fall in most places I've lived.

Why the Commerce Clause matters
Topic: Politics
This Is Not Over has an excellent post explaining why a thorough examination of John Roberts' approach to the Commerce Clause should be an issue in his confirmation hearings. The amazing Miss Alli offers both a clear explanation of a complex topic and the section title "Roberts: Strict Constructionist Or Flat-Out Toad Hater?" Awesome.

No longer content with the world
Topic: Odds and ends
...Google now stakes its claim on the moon.

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.

In a nutshell
Topic: Politics
The best brief assessment (not the best assessment, but the best one that can be read in three minutes or less) that I've read about the nomination of Roberts to the Supreme Court is Linda's comment on this post at This Is Not Over. For a lengthier discussion, I'm finding Slate's "Breakfast Table" commentary on the nomination interesting.

And here we have lucid, reasonable, and again, brief discussion of the Nanny Blog ridiculousness (family hires nanny, nanny tells mom she started a blog, mom reads and doesn't like it, fires nanny based on discomfort with blog) that's the current hot topic amongst bloggers.

Cage Match!!
Topic: Odds and ends
Johnny Depp vs. Chocolate on Fametracker: which has the higher relative worth to the world? Hmmm. Even a chorus line of singing, high-kicking chocolate bars wouldn't have made Pirates of the Caribbean interesting if Johnny Depp hadn't been in it, but for all his charms, Johnny Depp has never basically single-handedly gotten me through finals. This is much tougher than the nine-round all-out kicking-and-punching inaugural extravaganza that pitted Catherine Zeta Jones against Bagels.

Well, that didn't take as long as anticipated
Topic: Whatever
It turned into a perfect day for reading just after lunch -- the wind picked up and acquired a bite, clouds rolled in, and it started to rain. Almost as if the weather was endorsing my decision to curl up with a blanket and a pot of tea and just not move for several hours.

So I had blocked off the weekend to read Half-Blood Prince and I managed to knock it off in about 9 hours. I'm debating the merits of reading it again. I probably will -- I've got no other novels in the house at the moment, and no inclination to read anything that's not fiction. But I didn't find it as satisfying to read as the previous books. It doesn't seem to me that the characterizations in this book, particularly those of minor characters, are as engaging as they were in previous volumes. Obviously, it still held my attention, but I felt like the sub-plots and side jokes that I enjoyed in the previous books were missing from this one.

Rowling covers a lot of ground, but the story feels a bit rushed and didactic, as if to say, "I need to tell you this. Pay attention! This is important. So is that. This and that. Got it?" I felt like several plot points were telegraphed too obviously. There were also several instances where events from a previous book that were related to character or story development and continuity were referenced in a way that suggested that Rowling couldn't quite figure out how to use them, so just sort of threw in a "remember this?" sentence in a way that I found a bit jarring.

That said, I liked the way the book fills in quite a lot of significant back story, takes some interesting and unanticipated twists, and establishes a clear mood for the next book. I enjoyed the evolution of Ginny Weasley, and Harry's character is developing nicely as well. I think its possible that I may not fully appreciate this book until the next one is published, since it seems the book's primary function is to push the story along to the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort by tying up some loose ends, providing motivation for future action, and establishing what the stakes are for various characters.

Okay, yeah, I'm going to read it again.

Disappearing act
Topic: Whatever
The new Harry Potter book sits waiting for me. First, laundry, dishes, grocery shopping, tidying up. Where did this sense of responsibility come from?

It's already been a busy weekend. Yesterday HM invited me to lunch with her and her friend who's visiting from the States. HM was at the law school on a one semester student exchange, so she's not going to be around much longer and I wanted to spend time with her. So lunch was followed by a little souvenier shopping and a look at the exhibits at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and I let myself be talked into a trip to the Observation Deck in the Rialto Towers (the tallest office building in the Southern Hemisphere! At least, it was at the time the publicity materials were written), and then, because there were plans to go to Ro's that evening anyway, we just went straight there. Which is where I ended up spending the night, because the trams stop running at midnight, and the little party we had going didn't run down until 3 a.m. I really had thought I'd be coming home at some point during the day, which is why I didn't do the dishes or the shopping, and I'm off to do that now, and you will not be hearing from me again until I've read Harry Potter at least once!

Things Australia has done for me:
Topic: Catching up
Reminded me how delightful Cadbury's chocolate is - outside the US, that is.

Given me several delightful new junk food fixations: Arnott's is evil.

Introduced "reckon" into my conversation.

Made me feel strangely at home by rockin' out to "Livin' On A Prayer" at odd moments.

Given me several bizarre "tram tales" with which to entertain my friends. (Bizarre tram tale having nothing to do with me: 15-year-old boy takes tram for joyride).

Made me extremely wary of crossing the street, because I'm still not entirely sure which direction traffic will be coming from.

Taken my arachnophobia to fairly ridiculous levels.

Reminded me how much I enjoy thrift stores.

Occasionally bewildered me by having a nickname for just about everything: Macca's, cozzie, brekkie, footy.

Helped my budget go a bit further with great student concession tickets to everything from movies to museums.

Provided me with a lovely, vibrant, multiethnic city to live in. I love Melbourne.