2001-05-12 :: 10:33 p.m.

to recall the ivy's fall

Soundtrack: The Pietasters, Strapped Live!; New Order, Substance [Disc 1]

The leaves on the ivy are almost done turning red, and are mid-descent. I've been meaning to take a photograph. It's something I wanted to do as soon as they started to lose the green, and now it's almost too late, the naked stones of the main building are showing through. It's a sign. The little things remind me. Robyn's smile is tinged with the knowledge that soon enough we'll be back home --

Home? I've got three of them now (I feel like there's a link I should be making to an old entry there, but I can't be bothered finding it). Melbourne has a part of me now; I've got a bit of her too: just tonight I found myself saying "not too keen" when I was talking to Les and Chalkie. When I go back to the States I'll be saying "Yeah" with the strange bounce that Australians give it (sort of a long bobble on the "uh" bit). I'll be looking for Picnic bars, think that I can just catch a tram to get wherever I want to go, and want to take one last trip down to Naughton's for a jug of Toohey's (even though I hate that poison).

So these thoughts of finality make me a bit sad. I went out to The Vegie Bar with Robyn on Thursday, and we got on the subject of happiness. Robyn has one of the more agreeable personalities I've come across; no one ever really has much gossip to spread about her. She's just got a good nature, she's like someone who should have been alive in the 70's, happily naked in the mud at Woodstock, unleashing that often-present smile of hers. And it's not like she's not a thinker or deluded or simple or whatever, she and I have great discussions.¹ But somehow I think I ended up on a slightly more neutral platform, while Robyn smiles a little more often.

A lot of that neutrality is visible in the realization that it takes something like a skydive to make my brain stop spinning around and popping off onto self-conscious tangents. It seems kind of ridiculous that I have to do something on the order of falling out of a plane and hitting terminal velocity to let me just sit in a moment, let the second I am in be all that I experience or mull over. Robyn said she's gotten pretty good at just turning that Moebius strip part of her brain off and I don't think I've got that -- whenever I do, I feel really lousy, like I should be thinking more about this or that or what is that person doing, where were they born, where are they headed (why?), what do I look like to them, how might we be connected in the six degrees scheme of things? Because I see all of these diaries with pages and pages (offline, among my fellow travelers) and entries and entries (online, among my fellow inhabitants in this land of diaries and outside of it), people are thinking, goddammit, and are they thinking more or less correctly? Time's sprinting by, and I nap too much.

Back to Robyn: I think I said something like I was "comfortably resigned to not being content," as in, it's not so bad.² But when I said that, I felt sort of awful. Like, is this sort of easy apathy what I want forever? I don't want to whatever life away, I don't want these last weeks to go and leave me with the feeling that I just released them because my departure wasn't too far off.

The past few days I've been on the computers more than I have been in a while. I've been diary binging, and that usually mean something's wrong. The 500 word essay on Chinese that was due two Tuesdays ago is barely researched, and here I am OD'ing on the Internet. But I keep finding little bits that speak to me, and I want to take everything I'm reading in and synthesize out some beautiful summation of it all, a brilliant capital-t Truth, but the real truth is this is going to be like everything I'm reading: a fragmented ... something that just provides a personal spin, and then leaves me spinning back into the apathetic doldrums after that brief "Yes, that's exactly it" moment. But it feels so good to try and have those little moments.

And it feels so good to have someone call you and ask you to do something. Someone rang me up just as I was fighting off the stabbing knowledge that my nap was unneeded and work-avoiding (just one last snooze), and asked me if I wanted to go see Yolngu Boy. The voice was familiar, and yet I couldn't place who it was since she didn't identify herself and no Australian from college ever rang me up to go do something; we exchange students have our own little clique (unfortunate, but a fact of life at this point -- there are even sub-cliques within the foreigner group). But she said the film was about Aboriginals and a friendly invite is a friendly invite: I was in.

Looking rather daggy (sporting sleepy hair and the clothes that were closest to the bed), I waited outside. Soon Sarah B rocked up (so that's who it was). Sarah said nobody else was coming and so it was just us (I made some lame self-deprecating joke about being a good backup and immediately wanted to smack myself). We hurried to Lygon to Cinema Nova, as the movie was already underway, and we were going to be a bit late (shades of my Mononoke experience). We came in about 8 minutes or so into it (after a mad dash downstairs to the ATM when I found out they didn't take EFTPOS). The movie was quite good for what it was and had loads of beautiful aerial shots of the Australian landscape. It wasn't ground-breaking, but it was documenting something that needs to be seen. I want some films about Native Americans like this. The ending was a bit of a downer (however foreshadowed) and not quite the fulfillment of all of the subplots that had developed (a little quick to tie everything up), but the film prodded me to consider the impact of white Australia upon the indigenous people. The main characters in the film are teenagers caught between Western ideals and 40,000 year old traditions;³ this is what is really going on in Australia right now. And the Aboriginals are royally shat upon, just as we shat (and continue to shit) upon the Native Americans.⁴

After the film, Sarah and I got to chatting about our thoughts a bit (she was reminded of her trip to Kenya). The scene where the guys are jumping into a unearthed canoe to paddle the ~300 miles to Darwin brought on memories of the "things just happen without any seeming logic and look really strange in hindsight" themes in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and the escapism and longing in The Beach.

I was hungry at this point, having only had an unsatisfying chicken salad wrap and some tea at the Blue Zone Cafe in the late afternoon. Dinner at college was now half an hour away from being over (and guaranteed to be less than appetizing: yesterday I put a bit of the veal parmigiana cutlet in my mouth, closed my teeth over it, felt the texture between my incisors, and dropped it back down on the plate, resigned to just eating my chips, simply unable to consume it, even as mere fuel). Knowing that Sarah wasn't going to want to spend any money, I told her I'd shout dinner if she'd suggest a place. She was a bit taken aback but didn't turn it down. We wandered up Lygon towards the city and decided first upon Cafe Italia, but when we headed back towards it (the other way), we ran into a slew of people from college (it seemed everyone was out on Lygon tonight), including two guys who were planning on eating there -- so we ducked into University Cafe instead. It turned out to be a great choice; my garlic/rosemary/white wine pork filets (said "fill-its" here) were some of the nicest eating I've had in Australia. We had a great talk about people at school here and in America, pranks (her brother attends MIT, land of the hacks), and various geeky things (she's EE/Law, so I had plenty of common scholastic ground). I cut her off a few too many times (as I unfortunately do when I get excited during a conversation), but otherwise it was one of the best conversations I've had here in a while.⁵

We hit Caffe Trattoria for coffee on the way back (her treat this time, haha) to wrap it up. On the way home both of us expressed mutual frustration about everyone's fatalistic views of The End Of The Semester when there are several weeks left. I wondered if there was any subtext there -- apparently, so did a few other people. When I got back home the gossip was already flying: were Sarah and I together? A capital-t Thing? Jesus Christ.

The outing with Sarah was really good; it put me in a good mind. Shook off those whatever blahblahs. I didn't even mind going up to Les's (thinking we'd have a bit of a personal catch-up) and finding both her and Chalkie there; I just chatted them both right up (they were amused by various Jackass recollections). I mean, look, a respite from that horrible apathy and here's the longest entry I've had in a good long time. Granted, it's a creative little form of procrastination (that essay's no closer to being done, but it's no longer such a depressing thought).

On a final note, one of the thoughts that keeps recurring to me here is this constant amazement at human adaptability. As my prof in Evolution of Consciousness pointed out, the reason we succeed as a species is because when it gets cold, we don't die; we kill a bear and wear its skin and make some fires. On April 1^st I was spelunking in Labertouche and crawling through the strangest of crevices, turning this way and that inside a cave, marveling all the while. On April 15^th I was climbing to the top of Cedar Creek Falls in nothing more than thongs and bathers (which reminds me, there's an entry about that I wrote while there than I need to clean and post). On April 21^st I was snorkling the Great Barrier Reef, snapping away with an underwater camera. And on April 22^nd, I sea kayaked Pioneer Bay in the morning and did a 12,000 foot skydive in the afternoon.

From a couple emails, with typos corrected:

[To Adam]

Today I went caving at Labertouche; I think you would have loved it. It was totally dark, you could only see with your head torch. The area was pristine, it felt like we were the first people to ever climb through. The sunlight was completely blocked out, all you could hear was the rush of the underground creek and the echoes of cavers ahead, their torches bouncing to create eerie, cinematic effects.

The only hints of others having gone before were a few reflector patches scattered about to indicate that we were on the correct path (or at least, one of the correct paths). After the cave trek (and covered in silt from the rocks wet with seeping water), we emerged and had a barbeque, and you know how good food tastes after physical exertion.

...

[To Brett]

I think you really would have appreciated the serene, all-swallowing darkness, punctuated only by the head torches we had on our hardhats. It was like being wrapped in white noise, with the underground creek rushing below us.

There were so many moments that felt like images clipped from a movie. The boulders were huge, and I continually marveled that they had fallen in such a way that we could traverse them (however tricky it may have been). That in turn got me thinking about man being insanely adaptable, how we vertically-oriented humans had this incredible ability to just take our surroundings and work with them, turning horizontal in rock tunnels if the need arose. Can you tell I've been reading The Selfish Gene?

Skydiving, snorkeling in a wetsuit and fins, the concept of scuba diving (I wasn't allowed to go due to not having seen a dive doctor, which infuriated me, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise, as I wouldn't have been allowed to skydive the next day) -- even tents and camping stoves are amazing in what they let us do -- we take over areas we were never really intended to be in.⁷ You can look at that as a bad thing (like an Agent in The Matrix), but when I contrast it with the idea that we're all swirling masses of subatomic particles differentially measuring sensory stimuli and trying to spread our genes around, I get excited. We're so boring in terms of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens sapiens itself. Nothing's happened yet to us, all of the good bits are how we got here. The ability to vocalize, the concert of muscles and bones and the architecture of the larynx, my God, it's too much. To be able to use language -- to take over the air, harness sound, and create this action at a distance -- is so complex and unreal physically and cognitively that you have to wonder what could come after it, what sort of sensory system or expressive apparatus could evolve to top it. And then we invent all sorts of ways of sealing these crazy moments and experiences in words and film and videotape and bits in an attempt to beat time itself.

When I talk about it here, I get really worked up, really excited in the kid in a candy store sense. In a certain way, it's kind of paralyzing when the bizarre juxtapositions cross my mind as I'm talking to people or getting drunk or just walking along. But all of these things we do, everything that has been done, I have to remember to use it as a way to be excited for future possibility rather than be consistently resigned to stasis or insignificance.

It looks like four hours later I'm going to be relegated to doing a little reading for the essay and going to bed (after a bit of chocolate with Robyn) without actually, you know, doing the assignment. Well, tomorrow. I've said it about ten days in a row now, but this time I swear, really. Tomorrow will be good; I'll knock the Chinese off, and then see my cousins. I'm really excited to see my them again. They are good people, and they will make good food (and have some killer cheesecake on hand, I'm promised).

---

¹���We had been talking about St. Kilda's (which I'm told serves as something of the red light district here), and I mentioned the scene in Catcher where Holden has that long chat with the prostitute and then gets mugged by the elevator man/pimp. I always thought that such a fascinating scene, and we got to talking about what it would be like to interview a prostitute, and Robyn made the interesting point that perhaps -- while you aren't exactly engaging in a physically intimate act -- it would be the ultimate in intimacy in a way, because it demands a release of emotional defenses. Sort of an interesting contrast; hadn't really thought about that.

(Some sociology student in Canada did a really mind-boggling study about the adult industry over there; it documented the lives of 22 different women from all different walks of life, how they got to doing what they did, and what they thought about it. It was published online as a free book, and I remember sitting in the systems lab in high school and reading the whole thing when I was supposed to be working on my senior research lab. (Haha.) Really amazing documentation of these individuals. Unfortunately, I think it's lost to the digital ether now.)

(The Pietasters are sort of fitting for this sort of discussion, aren't they?)

²���Complacency [boringly] equating with a certain boredom -- but still, not being complacent lends itself to its own certain tired slothiness (the Everything Sucks/Is Done, Why Bother? attitude and/or the Too Much On The Todo, Therefore Do Nothing And Nap/Go Out (Then Regret It Later) attitude).

³���Writing that made me think of Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, one of the few books that actually made me furious to the point that my forearms seized up while I was reading it. When I say "furious" I mean that with respect to one of the characters (the father), which is a testament to Yezierska's skill.

⁴���I was reminded of the Native American wedding I was witness to not too long ago at a place called Indian Pines, the reservation back home (family home). It was a lovely ceremony and all, but I couldn't help but be depressed by the scrubland they had been given, what with its dead white grass and anorexic trees. The chief that had flown in for the occasion wore a headdress that was obviously factory-made; the tobacco he spread to create a spiritual circle came out of a plastic bag. Horses were tied up and teepees erected for the event, but they'd be gone in the morning, the facade was short-lived. I was so glad for the bride because she's a great person who deserves every happiness, and so this sadness had the compounded guilt that comes from being sad at a wedding (of all things!).

I remember noting one particular Indian (however un-PC, many of them wore shirts sporting that term) who had rather poor-looking clothing on, but was sporting a new pair of my overpriced sneakers (they're some of the best I've ever owned, but it's still a little silly) and loudly scolding his uncooperative daughter. She was hot and tired and squeamish and therefore didn't want to wait in the longish line to greet the married couple. Instead of dealing with it, he just yanked her out and made a big show of it, grabbing her so quickly his braid flew into the air.

In the old digital notebook, I found the following bit next to my notes from the wedding: being caught on video/photo unawares... your image "stolen". I imagine this was to do with my wondering what happens to the random videos and photos that everyone must be on in the strangest of places. Some random guy at the wedding must have been Handycamming the whole thing (which I seem to recall upon reading that note and all), and I usually try to avoid having my face captured by passing lenses, but I'm sure I'm on there somewhere. Strange feeling, to know those little unreclaimable fragments of my life exist on a tape somewhere that I will never see or know about (and even if the tape's with the bride and groom, as one might suspect, it's not like I'll ever be going over to check it out).

⁵���Two fellows from my Evolution class and I had a good talk after our Thursday tutorial. One of them (Sam) and I had shared a rather long (1.5 hours) chat the day before after class about all sorts of things (college in the US, responsible capitalism, the misguided campus socialists, how I hate fossilized French theorists, why critics often bother me, why hemp ought to replace paper, etc.). The other guy (whose name escapes me at the moment) had sort of waved his intellectual penis around in an early tut, but he came across as a lot more friendly this time around, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. There aren't too many people from classes that I hang out with here, so I got their numbers in the hopes of getting drunk and talking God and politics⁶ sometime next week.

⁶���There was a column in my high school's graduation edition of the newspaper in which the author wrote: "Get drunk and discuss God and politics, as long as you discuss God and politics." I always liked that. He was one of a few popular guys that congregated at the Starbucks after school during senior year, when we all finally had cars. The lot of them would shoot the [interesting] shit for a couple of hours before peeling out, and a few times they invited me to join them. Their candor and the sense of relative welcome made these some of the few moments when the popular crowd didn't have such a foul flavor to it.

⁷���All of these bits about what I did over break and stuff aren't getting across the extreme wonder I felt. They really aren't, and I'm afraid it's because I just haven't written them up very well. But to sit and think about everything that it takes for me to bring these words to fruition and for you to read them, that's a way to start small and make the point. The activities themselves are being named for todayidid sorts of reasons, but the diversity of environments is kind of worth noting. Anyway, I am too tired to try to make it more than a rambly bit of listing.