The Winter Refrain

Overheard in the mall on my way to work (and you'll have to imagine the nasal bogan whine that this is said in):
"Gee it's cold. I can't believe how cold it is!"
So I surreptitiously glance behind me in order to appraise this captain of the obvious and spot a cluster of idiots who are in thongs, shorts and T-shirts and one of them, in concession to the change in seasons, has thrown on a cotton hoodie. They are all hunched over and attempting to gain warmth from lit cigarettes.
It was minus 3^oC overnight. Winter, albeit a late (and probably brief one) has arrived. I do not understand the stubborn reticence of locals against putting on warm clothes. This cold weather happens every year. Surely it is not beyond any one's means to have one woolen jumper and a pair of socks bundled into the back of a drawer? That's all it takes, and you can get a decent jumper these days for what it costs to buy two packs of smokes. Then by 9 or 10 in the morning it is back up to a sunny and warm 18^oC or so, and then people, you can take the jumper off! A simple, but effective, system that has been serving humans for millenia called "clothing". I recommend it.

Also worth mentioning this week is that the World Health Organisation has officially declared Swine Flu (H1N1) to be a pandemic. Congrats Swiney on your new status. I'm sure no readers of this blog need any delineation made between pandemic and epidemic, but you will appreciate the irony in this being the week that on one hand the Sheltered Workshop has made buckets and buckets of hand sanitiser available to curb to possible spread of Swiney, and on the other (perhaps inevitable and very very bureaucratic) hand, decided that far far too many dollars are spent on tissues and so has cut off their supply. No worries, sneeze into your hand - there's plenty of hand sanitiser!

*shakes head*

Enlightenment from Band T-Shirts

I was just thinking that I would tell you about my time ITRW¹ over the last few days, given that I've had a 4 day long weekend. Some of that time was spent implementing project "Cheerful" by going to the QLD GOMA to see the exhibition "Optimism" and to a concert (concert doesn't seem the right word for 6 bands over 8 hours, but neither does "festival" fit anything where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are headlining) and then a large amount of time doing very normal things (took out the rubbish, started trying to make a picture of a giant octopus -as you do when you have a bit of time, went to dinner in Ipswich, and yes, we were the only people in the place on a saturday night at 8pm!, set up my new second-hand computer which won't boot up *sigh*, tidied, messed, washed, dried. Dull as dishwater. Literally).

I'm still processing some of the art/music experience. It was a very big day. I was going to root through it all and find some nugget of insight about public entertainment, give a little review of the event, share something pithy about the ecology of band t-shirts that were on display, maybe mention that I deliberately rationed myself to a max of 2 text messages to any person I felt compelled to say something to while there .... but either I'm not going to make enough sense of it and how I felt about it or in some important way I wasn't really there.

Isn't that weird?! If I'm not the one living my life - than who is?! Is the real me off in a different probabilistic 'verse having a much better ITRW experience and I'm just keeping this seat warm? Of course, scientifically that's hard to substantiate² so Occam's Razor⁴ would suggest something else is the true cause. Buddha tells me that this is the experience I'm having and I better come to grips with it. Strangely enough, it was a T-shirt on a tall lanky man who walked past me many times to fetch beers that has, in hindsight, untangled this knotted skein of transcendental angst. His shirt said, "Don't just listen to the music, feel it". Feel it. Hmmmm. Feelings .....

Feelings happen in the body, and I spent that time here. In my mind.
I was watching everything, noting, cataloguing and analysing it, thinking about ways to capture it ... not experiencing it. OHH!! (sound of light coming on) Gee whiz. Of course. What a drongo. Feelings might be important to project "Cheerful". I get it. Figured that one out all by myself. Ok, well there's a good heads-up for next time. Good thing I didn't get too committed to that idea of actually being busy in another probabilistically linked universe hey!!


1." In The Real World "
2. i.e. I borrowed that concept from a SF book and it has no Scientific basis AT ALL³, but it's a great story, you should maybe have a look at it - Anathem by Neal Stephenson. If you're going to steal - steal from the best.
3. Maybe a little in some little backwater of time/physics that I haven't got to or understood (that's not narrowing it down) so I can't say definitively that there's none at all, but, you know, it was fiction, and he normally footnotes really cool real things. So if it is real, don't hold it against me, but it's like, massively unlikely. That's all I'm saying.
4. I meant this is the newer and slightly less accurate sense, but in reading this reference, realised that both are applicable in this instance. How fortuitious! Also, here's a good example of where a mass usage, although incorrect, has already modified the primary meaning of the phrase. Inexorable! Another good reason to keep hold of those precious, printed copies of the OED with word histories in them!