Nothing is sacred
Topic: Odds and ends

Certainly not the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  And not even Baltimore City's anti-drug "Believe" campaign.  Not long after the campaign's 2002 launch, stickers saying "Behave" "Beehive" and the very vernacular "Blieve, Hon" (among others) cropped up around the city.  And now the latest modification of the slogan, which sent me into giggles on my way to the Avenue just the other day:

Acclimating
Topic: Catching up
I'm not doing it so well.  It hasn't been all that terribly cold since I got back to the States, but I'm freezing.  I was just half asleep on Kat's couch, wrapped up to my neck in a fuzzy afghan, with a cat curled up on my lap, and I was still chilly.  I wish I could've stored up the summer in Melbourne, soaked it in to my bones and let the heat radiate out slowly until spring. 

Charm City
Topic: Catching up

It's possibly the least fitting of Baltimore's nicknames.  For the grim, "Bodymore, Murderland" suits the city's violent crime rate.  "Smalltimore" captures the city's knack for putting someone you know in your path at the least expected moment.  "Mobtown" was at least earned, repeatedly - by wave after wave of riots in the city throughout the nineteenth century.  "Charm City" was manufactured, dreamed up by the same sort of people who saddled the city with slogans like "The Greatest City in America" and "Baltimore: The City That Reads" and the latest mediocrity, "Baltimore: Get In On It."  In a certain spirit of adaptation (or desecration) that characterizes the Baltimorean attitude toward such marketing efforts, the "Bodymore" people will occasionally throw out a "Harm City," just for good measure. 

And yet, Baltimore did charm me when I came here for college, and I do love it (in spite of itself, sometimes).  When I saw the downtown skyline from the window of the bus on Friday, I started to cry.  I was right to come back when I did, because my friend's death has complicated all my feelings about being in Baltimore.  He is so strongly linked with this city in my memories.  He should be here, and being here myself makes his absence all the more apparent. 

I have lots of other friends who are still here, though, and seeing them is like finding pieces of myself I hadn't realized were missing.  Or re-reading pages of a familiar but half-forgotten story.  So much has happened, so much has changed - but somehow it's like coming back to a half-read book after reading something else.  I might have to re-read a few pages, even a chapter, but then I'm back in the swing of the story.  There have been moments where I've had to remind myself that I've been gone, because I feel so perfectly at home here with my friends.  Just a few, but those moments are so comforting, with their reassurances that some relationships endure, despite time and distance.

Unsettled

I'm back in the States, but I can't say I'm settled.  Mostly I'm feeling dazed.  There is an intense sense of unreality around being here - in the US, in the suburbs, in my parents' house.  A big part of that is jet lag, and another part of it is culture shock.  And it doesn't help that I managed to sort of be in denial about leaving right up until I got in the car with the Good Doctors to go the airport.  Most other times I've left a place, the last three or four days I've just been impatient to go, to get it all over with.  Not this time.  I packed my bags, but resolutely refused to think about leaving as if it was going to actually happen.  

But happen it did - two long, uneventful flights and an interminable layover in LA later, I was in Philadelphia.  I flew from summer to winter in the course of a day.  Tomorrow I have to go shopping because I have next to nothing suitable to wear in cold weather.  I'm hoping the snow that's still on the ground now is the only snow I see this winter.   

Less than a week
Topic: Events

My mother is thrilled.  I am more ambivalent.  Happy that I'll be seeing my family and friends in the States, naturally, but not wanting to say my goodbyes in Melbourne.  And definitely not looking forward to repacking my bags - I just threw things in as I was clearing out my apartment, and as a result, I can barely lift one of my bags, and all my cold-weather clothes are at the bottom of the other.  As I don't want to throw my back out getting to the airport or freeze while unpacking once I get to the States, that situation will have to be remedied.  It's irritating to have to do it all over again, though.  

There's so little time left.  I had been able to be in denial about leaving, but my going-away party was last weekend, and I now have six days to go.  I don't quite know what to do with myself - rush around, jamming my days full of activities, or slow down, giving myself time to do nothing much if I'm not feeling up to much.  I'm torn - I don't want to have too much time on my hands, but I don't want to not be able to savour the time I do have.  

Packing again
Topic: Catching up

And this time, I'm not packing for a holiday. 

From Wednesday to Monday, I was in southern Queensland.  My stay with Mrs Dr's sister (hereafter, Sizza, for one of my favorite styles of Australian nicknaming - taking the first syllable of someone's name and adding -zza) and her family was lovely.  They have a huge, gorgeous house in Queensland, not far from the Gold Coast.  Their house sits up the hills a bit, so from their veranda offers a lovely view of the city skyline.  I sat out there every evening, watching flocks of cockatoos gallivanting through the trees as the sunset painted the distant high rises on the coast a blurry rosy gold.  

Thursday and Friday, Sizza shepherded Mrs Dr (also on a holiday visit) and I around some of her favorite places.  We went for a walk through Burleigh Heads National Park on Thursday morning, which was just lovely.  The track Mrs Dr and I took winds through a forested area along the coast, with dense bush on one side, and the ocean on the other.  We detoured for a walk along a sheltered beach with the softest sand my feet have ever touched.

Friday, the three of us drove down to the northern edge of New South Wales to visit Byron Bay and Bangalow.  The countryside we drove through was just gorgeous - mile after mile of stunning views of rolling green hills.  The first thing I noticed flying in to the Gold Coast was how green everything was.  Victoria has gone shades of dull brown, except for stands of hardy gum trees.  I know there's a severe drought happening, but I hadn't quite recognised just how bad it is until I got a bird's-eye view of the land around Melbourne.  If it wasn't for the gum trees, and the way the land is obviously broken up into fields and grazing areas, it could almost pass for desert from the air, it's so dry.  Southern Queensland is struggling with drought as well - their dams are at even lower capacity than Victoria's, but unlike Victoria, they've had just enough rain through the summer to keep the landscape green.  

The highlight of the trip for me was our visit to the lighthouse at Cape Byron.  I wish I had remembered my camera (but there are some lovely pictures at the Byron Bay link above).  The view was literally breathtaking.  The ocean is crystalline, and all shades of blue, from nearly lavendar gray at the horizon, to a sapphire blue so rich I can't even describe it where the water is deeper, to glassy aqua in the shallows.  The arc of Byron Bay is framed by thickly forested hills, and the constant breeze tosses the treetops, revealing the paler green underside of the leaves in waves that echo the surf on the beaches below.  Tallow Beach is a wide expanse of sand so pale and clean it almost glitters, a long, slow, golden comma between sea blue and forest green.  I could've sat there for hours watching the surf breaking in long tails of foam.  It was achingly beautiful.  

So I had a brief but delightful holiday, and now I'm back in Melbourne.  Today I have begun the process of denuding my apartment.  I've taken everything off the walls, I sold my fridge within minutes of posting an ad at uni and had it picked up this evening, and I'm now plotting how to get rid of the rest of my furniture.  What can be sold, what can be donated, and what will go out on the sidewalk in the hopes that someone will be unable to resist the allure of even beat-to-hell free furniture.  I've started packing my suitcases and boxing up my books. 

From tomorrow I have one week left in my flat.  From today, I have two weeks left in Melbourne.  Much as I can't wait to see my friends and family in the States, and much as I'm anticipating exploring Baltimore again,  I am not looking forward to leaving.  I have loved living here, and it's going to be hard to go. 

Ugandan women demand inclusion in the peace process
Topic: Development

Refugees International has published a great story about a couple of their staff encountering a march by Ugandan women to demand that women be included in peace negotiations, and that women's concerns be taken seriously in the peace process.  I wonder what the time-lag was - the march happened in November, but the story didn't reach their website until a few days ago.  Not complaining, mind you, just curious.  It looks like the only major Northern organization that got the story out more rapidly (aside from UNIFEM, which was a supporting organization for the march) was IWPR, and their story doesn't center the demand for women's inclusion in the peace process in the same way, initially emphasizing women's support for the peace process.  A SudanTribune article from early November takes a similar approach.  

I peripherally encountered gendered critiques of peace processes and peace building efforts while researching my thesis, and these critiques expressed similar concerns about accountability as those recently raised about reconstruction efforts.  This question of accountability is a huge one, because it's about who matters in society.  Reconstruction efforts have demonstrably been less concerned about the people in the communities that are rebuilding, than government and international donors.  What kind of message does that send?  Peace negotiations have tended to involve high-level politicians and military leaders, nearly always male.  What message does that send about who matters in society?  The women marching in Uganda are saying that they matter, and they've done the work to back it up - according to the SudanTribune article, they've consulted women in northern Uganda and will be developing a women's position paper on the peace process.  

I don't want to say too much more without more research and thought, but I did want to point out these stories while they were fresh in my mind, as I don't think I'm going to be doing serious thinking of a non-personal nature for the next few days.  As my departure deadline creeps ever closer, I'm becoming ever more aware that I've got a lot to figure out for myself in upcoming weeks.  Navel-gazing ahoy . . .  

Such a perfect day
Topic: Catching up

Today was full of lovely little moments, perfect closures to a gorgeous holiday.  When I opened the door from my room to the back yard early this morning to see what the weather was like, I startled three kangaroos from their quiet grazing of the rain-soaked grass into bounding flight.  From the safety of the bush, one stopped and looked back at me, perfectly still, almost invisible in the shadows. 

I slipped back inside, dressed, and walked out to the beach, intent on exploring the tidal pools I had discovered the previous day.  As I wandered down the road, I idly followed the flight of a crow, which ended on a nearby rooftop.  I almost missed the four cockatoos perched on the balcony below it.  They were so still and so perfectly spaced along the railing that they could have been taken for statues.  As I turned my head to get a better look at them, I realized that a perfect double rainbow was stretched across the sky behind me - such a beautiful surprise, and a perfect frame for the bird-bedecked house.  Then, not long after I started down the spectacular cliff-top walk along the coastline, it started to rain.

This was, in a way, an encapsulation of the entire holiday - a beautiful start, and a bit of a hitch in the middle.  After a day and a half of swimming and sunbathing, I started to come down with a sore throat, which quickly became a horrible case of strep.  I was so miserable, and so worried about making my friends sick, that I thought about ending my holiday early.  Fortunately, I was able to get to the doctor Thursday afternoon.  I felt better almost immediately after I got started on antibiotics, and was nearly back to normal by this morning.  No doubt that played some part in my sense of well-being.  The blessed absence of the ragged pain in my throat and brutal exhaustion of Wednesday and Thursday made me very happy.  

It was a hard, cold rain, and the sparse bush offered very little cover.  I was trudging back to the house, jeans soaked to the knee, when it finally stopped.  And as soon as it did, a pair of vivid red-and-blue birds (possibly these) swooped across the road just ahead of me.  Even after two years here, I'm still not used to seeing parrots in the wild.  A splash of ostentatiously colored feathers in the grass or a tree still makes me stop still.  I admired the effect of the jewel-toned birds in their dark green setting, and continued on my way.  Moments later, in a strange, lovely deja-vu moment, another pair darted from tree to tree across the road in front of me.  

I got back to the house to find that Flor, GSBoy, and Stellar were up and about, and not above finding amusement in my bedraggled condition.  The rest of the morning was a leisurely process of eating breakfast, watching old episodes of 'Sex and the City', packing, and cleaning.  We were on the road back to Melbourne just in time to stop for lunch in Anglesea, where we picked a restaurant mostly for its view of the water, expecting only adequate-to-pleasant food.  We ended up having a fantastic lunch - simple but thoughtfully prepared pannini and wraps, and a delightful lemon curd tart for dessert.  We half-seriously talked about having one last swim at Anglesea, but the weather swung wildly from sunshine to rain and wind in the couple of hours that it took us to have lunch.  We piled into the car, and in moments I was dozing, perfectly sated.  

Wouldn't it be lovely...
Topic: Politics

if more coverage of successful women in politics read like Barista's reflections on two of the big winners in Saturday's federal election in Australia:

Then she says something that really strikes me - that all the vivid images and the excitement of Saturday night, when the ALP swept the Tories away so convincingly, belong to the women. To Julia Gillard, under the gun and the camera in the tally room, focused and poised and never fazed, her mind and tongue active and accurate for a whole evening on a tumultuous merry-go-round of hope and fear. To Maxine McKew, making the most human speeches of the evening, laughing, intoxicated with the joy of the moment, defeating the Prime Minister in his own seat (or so it seems…)

Oh deeah
Topic: Whatever

This response to a Metafilter post about the added r's that crop up in certain English (including the UK, American regional and Australian) accents made me laugh until my stomach hurt.  It's so true.  This is just one reason why it's useless for an all-American team to bother with pub trivia here.