This work is good work

Two hundred and twenty-four letters need to be printed (4 goes it took for the printer to acknowledge the tray, the correct paper, the single-sidedness of the issue) each needs to be folded (by hand, so the crease is right to read the address through the little window) and go into one of two hundred and twenty-four envelopes, each letter to be accompanied by two copies of the competition form.
Dull day much?

There have been worse.
This client loves a personalised mailout. The largest so far was for 8000 but I made the client pay a rambunctious group of seniors to do the folding and stuffing (the printing alone took me over 7 hours). It would be easy to think that this kind of thing is a real low-point of my job. So tedius, so old-school, so, so predictable. And so yes they are tasks I'll procrastinate over a bit, mostly because once I start them they create massive drifts of papers and if it all gets interrupted (paper jams, unexpected meetings, file crashes) it can be a real mongrel to figure out where everything was up to.

But...
Actually these mailouts hit nearly all of the key criteria for satisfying work! How can this be?

1. It is easy to tell when I'm finished - the letters are put into our mailroom lady's hands. We exchange brief pleasantries.
2. These letters work. Addressed to previous customers who have purchased tickets to a similar show in the last 2 years, these are qualified, hot prospects. They sell tickets.
3. At the end of the process there's no further anxiety - that happens up front when I want to do something either new, tricky or clever with the copy and the client wants things nice and normal. Once that discussion is resolved for each project it is virtually a mechanical process to complete. I don't lose sleep over it once the lovely mail lady takes charge.
4. Did I mention that they work? We know because of the timings of sales after postage, but also because when we put a special offer in the letter, we can track the results super easily. Last time 800 letters got us over 100 sales. Sweet!
5. The client doesn't have to pay for postage and they get sales - mailouts make them happy. Happy client = less stress for me.

So as I sit folding, folding, folding, and stuffing (and checking I haven't put them in backwards) I can turn my brain off knowing that the only risk is a paper-cut or keep it on a little and browse some news and listen to music safe in the knowledge that although it might not be glamorous, exciting, interesting or something that would ever ever get mentioned in ads or shows about this industry, this work is good work. I am content.

2009 in books (pt1)

As usual I've been both cranky and ill.
Someone (irritating) at work today said,
"...but i've seen you be cheerful and friendly before"
and before I could remember the cover story I replied
"It was a LIE."

So, it's out in the open. On the other hand, once one has cultivated even a minor reputation for eccentricity, nothing after that needs to make too much sense to be shrugged off as "just another thing." So you can tell the radical truth and it becomes outrageous entertainment.
"What do you think of so-and-so?"
"I love him and obsess over him in the long nights of my solitude."
Cue uproarious laughter.

It couldn't be any better if I actually wore a Jester's outfit.
But I digress.

For anyone who hasn't noticed it is pretty much the middle of the year. I considered some kind of sincere post, but I'm not up to it. The only goal-related thing I would say is that I am happy with my reading list so far this year, which has held up rather well despite being flooded this month by a series of works by Stephenie Meyer. The tally stands at 28 books in total and of these, 13 are non-fiction! Nearly exactly half!! WOOT! (gently mimes punching air so as not to dislodge reading glasses.

Of these, what books can I recommend to you my tasteful and clever audience?

A good question.

From January, Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman. Very thoughtfully re-published by Penguin in their charming $10 range (thank you Penguin and good idea going back to classic jacket designs!). Get into some Physics - it is already in you!!



February yielded some good quality reading in the form of The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton (another Penguin $10 winner). A novel about Tesla called The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt and a collection of Essays gifted to me by Mez called How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen. I felt pretty clever by association after those highlights.



March needed a new flavour, so I read the new SF by Richard Morgan - The Black Man and I really liked it but I recommend it to SF readers with some qualifications (depending on your taste). The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman was lovely and had a little unsaid, which I like. The real standout this month was finishing The Invisibles by Grant Morrison which was a loaner from MsJaye and one of those books that infects and gives one a fever. I got through the fever, and now I can't wait to find out what I'm inoculated against or prepared for. Turns out I love anarchistic-chaos-magic. I want to do it again! (BTW for snobs - be warned - that one's a comic.)



April was quiet, I read some non-fic that was a bit dull and I re-read a favourite novel and then read a French SF novel called Babylon Babies (by Mauice Dantec, but I don't remember the translator. It wasn't Nicole Kidman so don't sweat it). I'd read some mixed reviews and of course the film (Babylon AD)was hopeless but actually i thought that the book was good. Not quite as fully anarchist chaos magical as The Invisibles, but possibly a good enough chaser. Lots of good themes and a clever central character and plenty of wild tech. I would like to read more SF from NESB (non english speaking background) as the flavours and textures are less predictable (all of which was pretty much removed for the film. Poor Vin Diesel. I bet he loved the original script.)



So May was not a big reading month, I was pretty sick, but I did finish Kimono: Fashioning Culture by Liza Dalby which I got on a whim and then was able to read nearly half of during a day of travel. It was fascinating, and I feel slightly more informed now when I watch Japanese cinema, or see modern women wearing Kimono. Actually, I'll fess up and say that I went out of my way to re-watch Memoirs of a Geisha just so I could look at all the kimono.


June, ah June. June has been the month of escapist reading. Binging on one-night-reads is something we all do sometimes, but that doesn't make me proud. In the middle of that I finished What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Darwin Knew: From fox-hunting to Whist - the facts of Daily life in 19th-Century England by Daniel Pool which I had been very eagerly awaiting. I was anticipating a detailed and exhaustive book, but actually this book ought to be subtitled "In Which Things that are Almost Obvious from The Context of the Novel are explained in length oftentimes using Quotations from Self-same Novels. Perhaps you ought to read more proper history books?"
Ah well. More than half of this puny book is pointless. I'm trying to think of a redeeming feature .... um .... it has some nice etchings.

I love to keep lists of books, I wish I'd given-in to the urge a long time ago instead of feeling furtive and dirty for wanting to do so. In a lot of ways it is a more interesting way of tracking the tides and flavours of my life than the dates of trips or the odd event. Movies and Knitting have both taken up a lot of time that I would otherwise have spent reading. But that's ok - ther'e more to come in the great Western Genre exploration, and Riley very nearly has his own bespoke cardigan.

Deciding not to know

It's about a quarter to ten on a mid-week night (you know it's wednesday - the damn post is time stamped!) and my week of house-sitting for Sis2 is halfway over. The highway out the front is pumping with the flow of semi-trailers both in towards Brisbane and out towards the range and the inland highways. They're properly called a B-double Combination but of course are contracted to "B-Double" and I would like to think but cannot assert with any veracity (but shall put it out there anyway), to "B-Dub", my sister-of-the-wife-of -a-real-trucker access only gets me so far and no farther (even if I were to show my tatt it wouldn't help - wrong kind of ink for this crowd). Anyway, this is the only time day to day that you can be in the house and really notice that you're only a few hundred meters from a major transport artery. There's plenty of traffic during the day, but the general noises of the house cover most of it, and something about the traffic flow keeps it all a bit muted (I don't want to point any fingers here, but I think it's because during the day the speed limits are only flaunted by 10 or 20 kloms per hr). Tonight, as each night, it sounds like I'm under a runway for cargo planes that never leave the ground.

Australia leads the way in the use of B-Doubles. They can clear a port up to 17% more quickly (fascinating isn't it? Read the rest of that article here or delve deeply here go on, live a little). We're a big trucking country. Excuse me if I'm repeating myself about the importance of the B-Dub in the road transport world. They are the lion of the asphalt plains! The haemoglobin on our economic bloodstream! And after three days of sharing the road to and from work with the general public (a whole nother kettle of stinking rotten dead fish) and these giant trucks I was curious as to what they might weigh. I know how fast they're moving, and for some macabre reason I thought I might try and figure out what their momentum is (ie to see how dead I would be if they ran over my little car, even a bit). Sometimes as they change lanes there's a particularly terrifying wobble that moves through the load and I seem very close to a lot of very large wheels. Upon further reflection, I think I should not figure this out, even roughly. These are not the kinds of informational tidbits that will make the long drives easier, nor are likely to endear me to any random persons I may be in conversation with anytime in the next, say, 3 to 5 years.

Because that's the risk - there's some things you can't un-hear, un-see or un-know. Dropping even a single one of them into conversation can expose you as the fraudulent, freaky, or flat-out weird person that no-one wants to sit next to at a work function, live near, or invite to parties or go out for coffee with (unless, oh happy days, they too harbour curiosity that leads them into knowledge, strange philosophies and odd tastes in reading matter ... but there are other, safer secret handshakes with which to gather this kind of intel. "What do you think of that Dexter show?", "How cool is that Mars ice?!" but again I digress).

Knowing that the Panama Canal was first crossed on a Tuesday is an exactly fine tidbit to have floating around the noggin. It doesn't even have to be right! (I got this from a film and haven't even bothered to verify it, but have shamelessly used it on a number of occasions.) It can pop up when small talk is required but is too taxing in relation to the expected return and creates a small burst of conversational frisson to get over the hump into actual dialogue or out of the elevator. Telling people ways they can die in everyday situations - never popular. I'm unpopular enough without further handicap.

Things I've learnt in June 08*

1. Holes in gardening gloves make them redundant. Bite the bullet and chuck them out.
2. Dogs dislike the smell of nail varnish.
3. My snooze button only works for 45 minutes.
4. Ridley Scott is working on a new Sci Fi film. OMG.
5. I can knit a scarf or a beanie in a weekend - but not both.

6. Not many people hire out carnival/movie style popcorn machines.
7. Mum's homegrown mandarins taste brilliant.
8. Soy sauce stains books badly when it spills unnoticed in the carrybag.
9. There are people in the world who will wish you a "Happy New Year" today. And they are not joking or being ironic.
10. Taking photographs of objects is not as straightforward as it may initially seem.

11. Sometimes it is cheaper to buy the hardcover edition of an old book on Amazon. Go figure.
12. Imagining is a lot easier than creating.
13. Scones taste best fresh. Good jam will carry the day.
14. There is no satisfaction in being right about grim things.
15. The ancient Romans used to make a silica based concrete that modern science is now advocating we return to due to its much lower carbon footprint.

16. Reading a great work of literature in small blocks (of two and a bit pages) does not diminish its impact.
17. Hollywood does not, in the end, shy away from using images of a dead star to heavily promote a forthcoming film. Actually almost featuring them. Macabre.
18. Sometimes, people who write about art don't want you to understand what they're talking about. That would spoil the fun.
19. Being able to grow things is marvelous, and possibly a right that is under more threats than we feel comfortable acknowledging.
20. Being lonely every now and then isn't so bad.

*Some items re-learnt from previous years.