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E.J.i.A.: Day 10
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Jul. 28th, 2008 @ 08:34 pm
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 21, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
I fell a little behind on these. Sorry guys. Clarion is hard.
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My last day in Sydney was mostly spent relaxing, packing, and preparing to depart for Canberra the next day. So, a couple more random observations.
-I DO NOT THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS-
There are a few words that, in Australia, mean the precise opposite of what they mean in the United States. So far I have discovered two of them, in both cases by having very confused and frustrating conversations.
The first is "liberal." In Australia, the right wing party is called the Liberal party, and the left wing party is called the Labour party. So if you, as an American, are asked your political stance by an Australian, responding, "I'm a liberal" will communicate precisely the wrong thing. This happened more than once.
The other word is "entree." In Australia, an entree is an appetizer. If you don't know this, you can find yourself in a fancy restaurant saying something like, "What? No! Look, it's listed under appetizers, but I would like an entree-sized order," to a waitress who then stands in silence trying to decide if you are actively malicious or merely unutterably stupid.
-THE MYSTERY OF THE KOALA SILHOUETTE-
Remember when I mentioned going to wildlife world? There are lots of silhouettes of animals painted on the walls there, including one in particular that I want to share with you. It was a little out of the way, near the elevator on the top floor. Look at the picture at this link:
http://homepage.mac.com/supergravity/.Pictures/koaladot.jpg
This one seemed to stand out to me. I think that was because it blatantly suggests a koala's anus. I refuse to believe this was an accident; this was done on purpose. But why? Why is there a subliminal koala anus in a major tourist attraction? I have two theories.
Theory 1: The disgruntled silhouette painter. In this theory, the man responsible for painting all the animal silhouettes on the walls of wildlife world hates his employers. He thinks to himself, "I hate those stupid koala anuses, always rolling in here and bossing me around! 'Make that one bigger. Make this one cuter.' I'll show them what I really think of them!" And then he does.
Theory 2: The fitness-conscious architect. In this theory, the silhouette around the elevator button was planned as a way of subconsciously promoting fitness among tourists. Some architect or interior designer thought, "Maybe if taking the elevator involves symbolically poking a koala in the anus, people will be more likely to take the stairs."
If anyone has any other theories, I'd like to hear them.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
esky == cooler
--E. J. Fischer
(Current Location: Canberra, Australia)
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E.J.i.A.: Day 9
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Jul. 7th, 2008 @ 11:47 pm
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 20, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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I decided I had seen enough of Sydney proper, and that it would be a shame if I didn't see some more of the ol' natural wonder, so I booked a day tour to the Blue Mountains and the Jenolan Caves.
-A FORTUITOUS ACCIDENT-
The tour I booked cost $135, and I had to show up at the Star City casino bus terminal at 8:15 am to check in and pay for the trip. Since I am staying out in the 'burbs and am dependent on public transportation, that meant getting up at 5:30 to ensure I could find my way there in time. As I wandered around Star City I saw a sign that said "AAT Kings Check In" with a list of tour destinations including the Jenolan Caves. I went to the desk, behind which was a woman with the most bubbly personality I have yet encountered in Australia. She giggled at everything. She giggled when I told her that I had reserved a seat on a tour. She giggled when I told her which one. She gave a sad little giggle when she told me she had no record of me. And when she asked me to confirm that I had reserved a $95 seat on the trip to Katoomba and the Jenolan caves, and I said, "No, I reserved a $135 seat, but let's pretend I reserved a $95 one," she giggled lots.
Anyway, the tour description she showed me was basically identical to the one I had read last night. I didn't know what was going on, but these people had a bus going everywhere I wanted to go, for forty dollars less than I had been willing to pay. I bought it. On my way out of the complex, I passed another desk area that had no signs leading to it, for a company called Australia Pacific Tours. On a whim, I asked if they had record of me, and, of course, they did. I told them they could go ahead and take me off the list.
Their bus and the one I was on went to the same places all day long. It was great.
-SCATTERING, PART 1-
The Blue Mountains get their name because, from a distance, they look blue. The bus driver informed us that this is because they are covered in eucalyptus forests, which exude eucalyptus oil, which gets into the air and makes the mountains look blue. Though I don't actually know how big the molecule for "eucalyptus oil" is, I assumed that the bus driver was describing Rayleigh scattering -- the same thing that makes the sky look blue. Though if any of the physics professors (or, I suppose, physics grad students) on this list want to correct me, I'd be happy to hear it.
-SCENIC WORLD, DON'T BOTHER ME!-
The first stop was at a place in the Blue Mountains called Scenic World, and as I mentioned yesterday, I hated it there. To explain why I hated it there, I have to tell you about the special qualities of the Australian fly. But these qualities have already been expressed, in a way I am unable to improve upon, by author Bill Bryson in his book FROM A SUNBURNED COUNTRY, so I will simply share his explanation with you.
"Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. Somewhere on an exposed portion of your body is a spot, about the size of a shirt button, that the fly wants to lick and tickle and turn delirious circles upon. It isn't simply their persistence, but the things they go for. An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue."
Scenic world had tens of thousands of flies. Even at the deepest point I could find within the complex, there were dozens of them around every light fixture, just waiting for a person to enter that they could swarm down upon. It was a nightmare. I eventually went back and waited in the bus.
-900 CEMENT STEPS-
Finally we left Scenic World and went to the Jenolan Caves. The cave that I got a tour of as part of my package was the most popular, the Lucas cave. It is named after John Lucas, the politician who passed laws prohibiting tourists from taking pieces of the cave structures as souvenirs. There are electric lights and a cement path that leads through the entire cave. The first, and largest cavern you enter is called The Cathedral, and it was actually used as a church until 1975. There are still concerts held there, due to the chamber's excellent acoustics. The tour ends an hour and a half later in a cavern that is actually located directly below The Cathedral, and that when first discovered was filled with the skeletons of animals that had fallen in and had no way out. Being below a chamber called the Cathedral, and being full of bones, this cavern was, or course, called... the Bone Room. I guess they don't have the word "crypt" in Australia.
In terms of cave structures, Natural Bridge Caverns near San Antonio is actually more impressive. But this tour was worth it because one cavern that you walk through is full of the rubble of an ancient cave-in. The chamber is littered with remnants of the violent collapse, huge broken stalagmites pointing at odd angles, a jumble of giant boulders on the floor. And then there are younger structures that have actually begun to grow over the destroyed ones in the thousands of years since the event. It is pretty neat to stand in. Aside from that, I didn't think it an especially impressive cave. It is the most heavily trafficked one in the complex, though, and if I were ever to return I might try one of the more out of the way ones.
-SCATTERING, PART 2-
We exited the mountain and walked out into the rain that had started while we were underground. The bus driver had to negotiate our touring coach up the narrow cliffside roads with essentially zero visibility, as we were inside of a cloud. All I could see out my window was a series of tree branches poking out of the solid white haze. In other words: a lot of Mie scattering. So we had Rayleigh scattering on the way there, and Mie scattering on the way back. This amused me.
So I said it aloud! I did! I said, "Hey! On the way here, when we looked at the mountains we saw Rayleigh scattering, and now when we look at the mountains we see Mie scattering!" And everyone laughed and nodded and agreed that it was a delightful contrast, and we asked each other conundrums and played at paradoxes and had a grand time! And old man from Sweden challenged me to derive the equation for the maximum number of distinct pieces you can cut a pancake into with n cuts! The driver told us the general solution to the three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations! I've never had such nerdy fun!
At the end of the ride, for starting it all, the rest of the passengers were so pleased with me that they bought me a kangaroo with a saddle on it that I can ride like a happy, hoppy pony. I love Australia.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
cossie == a swimsuit. (shortened form of "bathing costume")
--E. J. Fischer
(Current Location: Sydney, Australia)
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E.J.i.A.: Day 8
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Jul. 6th, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 19, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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I am once again writing (part of) this in my notebook for later transcription. Right now I am in a place called Scenic World, in the Blue Mountains. I hate it here, and I will explain why in the next email, with the help of another writer. For today I will relate the story of my Palm Beach hike and some random observations from my travels to date.
-HIKING AT PALM BEACH-
My big adventure yesterday was a hike from Palm Beach to Barrenjoy Lighthouse. Howard suggested it as a place he likes to go, and I was eager to see more of Sydney than the central business district, so off we went. Small shacks near the shore at Palm Beach rent for several million dollars. (Apparently the latest celebrity renter of one is Elle MacPherson.) The bottle of water I bought there cost 12% more than an equivalent bottle of water in the city. It's an expensive place. Fortunately they don't assess a fee to walk around there...yet.
The actual hike up to the lighthouse is a story better told in pictures. So here is a link to my first online gallery from this trip:
http://trinityu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2028397&l=a0852&id=24900011
(Those of you who are Facebook friends of mine can leave comments by navigating to the album through my profile, rather than using the public link.)
-LET'S CHAT ABOUT SHOES! NO, REALLY!-
(I'm so sorry about this. Here we go.)
A couple of weeks before I left on this trip I spent the night at Valerie's apartment and awoke in the morning to find that her dog had eaten my shoes. Val and I went to North Star mall, where I had originally purchased them, to try to get a replacement pair, only to discover that those shoes were no longer available. We went to several shoe stores looking futilely for a something close to what I had worn before. Finally I walked into the Clarks store and said, "Show me your most comfortable walking shoe that doesn't have a shiny finish." The salespeople huddled to discuss it for a moment, and then one of them took me to an expensive pair of shoes that I ended up buying.
The shoes in question are the Clarks UnStructured walking shoe, and they are amazing. They required no breaking in. I have hiked up hills, climbed sand dunes, walked on beaches, and navigated my way through the city in them in comfort. I have done more walking in the past week than I probably did in the previous three months, and I haven't gotten a single blister. My feet don't even hurt an hour after I stop walking! I've never had shoes like these before. These shoes feel more like tools than clothing items to me now. I love them. If you plan to walk around a foreign country, you should consider getting some.
The end. I promise to never talk about shoes again.
-HIDE YOUR VALUABLES, SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN-
It seems to be very popular in the suburbs of Sydney at Christmas time to buy life-sized Santa Claus dolls and affix them to the outside of your house in such a way that it looks like Santa is trying to sneak in or out. I've seen Santas rappelling up (or down) walls, creeping in (or out of) windows, and hiding menacingly under awnings. And every one of them looks like a cartoon burglar, with sack of pilfered loot over one shoulder. Apparently, by the time Santa has worked his way down to the southern hemisphere, there isn't enough Christmas left to fiddle around with that tricky chimney crap, all there is time for is some good, old-fashioned breaking and entering.
I had more to put in this email, but I'm tired so I'll save it for another day. Let's skip straight to...
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
norks == breasts
--E. J. Fischer
(Current location: Sydney, Australia)
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E.J.i.A.: Days 6 and 7
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Jul. 5th, 2008 @ 10:36 am
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 18, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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*DAY 6*
I did nothing special. I slept in, I read, I wrote, I ate leftovers, I played with the dog. I did not ever leave Howard and Jill's house. It was a personal day. As such, I have nothing meaningful to write about. (The day did begin with the Sadness Drops, but I already told you about them.)
So, since I took a day off from exploring yesterday, I get to take a day off from writing a long email today.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
sunnies == sun glasses
*DAY 7*
I took the ferry into the city again. Walked around. Helped an old woman who seemed very confused find George street, the only goal that she was able to clearly articulate. She did thank me when I got her there, which revealed a degree of awareness of what I was doing that I had suspected wasn't there. And left me marginally confident that she might have gone on to not die after we parted ways. Then I took the ferry back to Manly, took the bus to Dee Why, and decided to see if I could navigate back to Howard and Jill's house on my own. It turns out I could, but in the process of doing so I discovered that my bus route map was not drawn to scale, a discovery that involved walking uphill for four kilometers. Fun! The day ended with my taking Howard and Jill and Tim out to dinner at a beachside restaurant to thank them for giving me a place to stay, and then passing out for twelve hours.
I'm planing to find some new activities, so I should have interesting things to write about soon.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
sambo == a sandwich
--E. J. Fischer
(Current Location: Sydney, Australia)
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E.J.i.A.: Day 5
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Jul. 2nd, 2008 @ 11:19 pm
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 16, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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Yesterday was another long day of walking around Sydney, seeing sights. Only this time it was humid and rainy, which made it much less fun. I saw the newly-constructed Wildlife World, which is right next to the Aquarium and is good, but not really in the same league as its neighbor. I also saw the Powerhouse Museum, which is probably the most famous museum in the city. The Powerhouse Museum is terrible. It has lots of interactive exhibits, almost none of which are functional. One of their noted attractions is a model of the Strasburg Clock, which you can read about here: http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/exhibitions/strasburg_clock.asp The clock didn't work. There was dramatic music, and recorded narration describing what the clock was supposed to be doing, and spotlights cycling to highlight the action, and the clock just sat there doing nothing at all. We, the audience, all just stared at each other dumbly and felt embarrassed for the clock and the museum. The Powerhouse Museum, it seems, basically used to be the weakest member of the same tech museum herd that the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is currently patriarch of. Sadly, the Powerhouse Museum has been subject to predation, and now there are unspeakable things living in its carcass. This place used to be called the Sydney Technological Museum, and its current temporary exhibition is a celebration of the life of Princess Di. Verdict: to be avoided.
Aside from that, the most interesting thing I did yesterday was buy ear drops. And that is only interesting in retrospect, after I used them this morning. I bought them because I was having trouble hearing out of one ear, from what felt like built up ear wax, so I was looking for an ear wax solvent. I have one I use at home, called Debrox, and it works very well. But that product doesn't seem to be available here. So I bought a substitute, one that Becca mentioned she has at home. It is called Cerumol.
After I used Cerumol, I had a fantasy. It takes place in an alternate universe, where I am a young up-and-comer in a marketing firm. Alberto Culver Australia (U.K.) Ltd., the company that distributes Cerumol, comes to my firm and says, "Our hideously expensive market research has shown that the average consumer has difficulty understanding our product. They don't actually know that the medical name for ear wax is cerumen. We want to hire you to re-brand our product, Cerumol, in a way that consumers will have an easier time relating to. Something that really captures the essence of what the product does!"
The job, of course, gets assigned to me. I take my free samples home, think hard, use all the knowledge I acquired in the process of getting my expensive marketing degree from Trinity University. And, of course, I sample the product. The next day I go to my boss at the firm, and give him my preliminary suggestion for the new Cerumol brand name: Horrible Burning Ear Glue ®
"No, no. That will never do," says my boss. "The customer won't go for it. That name is entirely too long! You have to capture the product's essence in a pithy, memorable way. Be less literal-minded. You can even be symbolic if you have to, just make it catchy."
So I go back home. I think some more. I try the product again. While I am hunched over my bathroom sink, trying desperately to wash it out of my ear, it comes to me. The perfect name: Sadness Drops ®. I take it to my boss, he presents it to the client. The company reps agree that I have captured the spirit of their product perfectly, bring Sadness Drops to market, and get promptly smashed into their just business oblivion by properly informed consumers. I get fired from the marketing firm and win all kinds of awards for consumer protection and social justice. The alternate world becomes a better place.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
dot == backside or bottom.
--E. J. Fischer
(Current Location: Sydney, Australia)
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| » E.J.i.A.: Day 4 |
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 15, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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A preliminary and heartfelt "Thank you!" to everyone who has written me saying they enjoy reading these emails. And a reminder: if you aren't enjoying them, and don't want to get them anymore, let me know and I will stop sending them to you.
-THE LIST OF AWESOME PLACES-
--New item: The Sydney Aquarium--
The Sidney Aquarium is located in an area called Darling Harbour. As my bus got me downtown for my meeting at a bar next to Darling Harbour two hours early last night, I decided to give it a look. At the front are some small, visually unremarkable fish. Then come tanks containing larger, and slightly more distinctive fish. And then comes the enclosure of the saltwater crocodile, which is in a room with compelling displays about their biology, and I begin to have faith that there are interesting things to see. I turn the corner, and there are enclosures of florescent coral, and octopuses, and cuttlefish, and giant crayfish, and 40 lb crabs, and moon jellyfish, and I begin to think I am in a really nice aquarium after all.
And then comes the Oceanarium.
To get to the Oceanarium you walk over a covered but open-sided bridge that lets you know for the first time that you are in a building suspended over the harbour. After you cross the bridge, you come to a room with a series of ramps that curl around each other and descend maybe forty feet, which makes it clear to you by the time you are at the bottom that you must be below the waterline you were just able to see a few moments ago. Here there is a small glass window through with you can see lots of impressively large and active sharks. The path leads around the corner, and when you follow it you find yourself walking through a glass tube, underwater, with giant sharks and manta rays and sea turtles all around you, basking on the glass and swimming on all sides of you so that you feel as though you could touch them. And you can, almost. You can reach out and press your palm a centimeter away from the belly of a stingray or a basking shark (though the signs ask that you don't). It is incredible. I can't imagine another setting in which it would be possible to view these creatures so closely for so long. I felt like Aquaman, like I was just strolling around the bottom of the sea with these animals, sharing their environment. I didn't want to leave. But when I did, I discovered that the next, and final, section of the aquarium is a nearly as effective recreation of the great barrier reef. Which, you know, isn't too harsh on the eyes either.
When in Sydney, go to the Aquarium.
Just a couple of brief notes of interest from the rest of yesterday...
-HOW TO INVITE YOUR PASSENGER TO ENGAGE YOU IN A DISCUSSION OF ARRANGED MARRIAGE-
Say: "No, I do have a full time IT job right now. This is actually my first night driving a taxi. I'm only doing it to raise a little extra money. ...Because I'm probably getting married in a month."
-AN EXCELLENT WAY TO GO TO BED IN A BAD MOOD, DESPITE HAVING HAD A NICE EVENING WITH FRIENDS OLD AND NEW-
Have the cab ride home cost one hundred dollars.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
"spitting chips" == very angry
--E. J. Fischer
(Current location: Sydney, Australia)
Jul. 1st, 2008 @ 07:24 pm
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| » E.J.i.A.: Day 3 |
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 14, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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Let me get away from giving you the blow-by-blow account of my days, and try to focus only on things that have a chance of being interesting.
-REMEMBER, REMEMBER THE MONTH OF MOVEMBER-
-Being a continuing exploration of Australian facial hair-
So I've started bringing my suspicions about the connotations of having a beard in Australia to the attention of Australians. Becca, when asked, simply supplied, "Yes, we're a clean-shaven people." But James, who is Jill's son-in-law and who I met for the first time last night, told me that if I had only come a few weeks earlier I could have seen him with "huge mo." "Mo," here, means moustache, and he grew his mo for Movember.
Movember is an Australian charitable event. It is sort of like Walk for the Cure, if you did all the walking with your face. I think. That might not be my most well-crafted simile ever. Anyway, during Movember men grow mos to raise money and awareness for men's health issues, such as prostate cancer. It is apparently very popular in Australia and New Zealand. This tells me that facial hair is seen in Australia as a sort of mild inconvenience that the non-impassioned are willing to submit themselves to, but only for a good cause. And given that two weeks in to month twelve there is hardly a mo in sight, they won't keep it up for any longer than necessary.
-MUSEUMS! I SEEN 'EM!-
Yesterday, while wandering around the city, I visited two museums. The first was called the Museum of Sydney, and it cost ten dollars to get in, and I want that ten dollars back. This museum had actually been recommended to by Jill, on the strength of a temporary exhibition that had been there when she visited. Whatever that was, it was there no longer. The only mildly interesting thing in the whole place was an empty movie theater where they played a series of old newsreels about Sydney. This allowed me to hear, in a newsreel about the construction of the Sydney harbour bridge, the man with the most stilted delivery in the world say (and I'm paraphrasing here, slightly), "Every. Day miracles. Are wrought and the impossible. Achieved! Here. In the quayside foundry. As. Iron girders. Are. Bolted together." Fun, but not worth ten dollars.
The other museum I visited was the MCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. This museum had free admission and had one exhibition with an admission fee of seven dollars, and was totally awesome. The two most interesting of the four artists whose work is currently on display were Julie Rrap and Tim Hawkinson.
Julie Rrap is a Sydney-based artist whose work largely features altered nude self-portraits and photography. But she also does a lot of weird conceptual art--videos of cockatoos eating seed out of dentures, a naked woman with molasses dripping off of her, time-delay photography of ants eating a female nude sketch done in honey, a necktie made out of a cow's tongue. Wacky stuff. The most interesting thing was a darkened room with a slightly raised plinth in the center. On it, several meters apart, were two plain white sculptures: a nude acephalous woman lying on her back, and a nude acephalous woman lying on her stomach. In the ceiling there was a digital projector, casting the image of a nude woman lying on her back onto the corresponding sculpture. Audio of the woman breathing was playing. Slowly, the projected woman starts to roll over, off of one sculpture, across the plinth, and onto the other, now on her stomach. Then she pauses, and rolls back.
The best thing in the museum, though, was the Tim Hawkinson exhibition, which was the one that cost 7 bucks. It was entirely worth it. Tim Hawkinson works in more or less every medium there is, from pen and ink to cardboard boxes to kinetic, hydraulic, and electromechanical sculpture. One of his more easily describable works were a giant (as in, 15 by 5 meters) wall hanging made out of and aluminized quilt, sculpted into the shape of the bottom of a human foot, with all the little ridges and lines. Another was a sculpture of a massive sailing ship mapped onto a mobius strip, masts running all along the side. There was also a gimbaled basket woven into the shape of a klein bottle, and bronze sculptures, and a kinetic/auditory sculptural installation called "drip" which I won't attempt to describe. And then there was the weird stuff....
Actually, I'm having difficulty knowing how to communicate what I found impressive about his work. I'm not very accustomed to writing about visual art. Fortunately, there are other people who are! For your further edification, here is a passage I copied out of a book on Hawkinson that they had in one of the rooms. It is from the introductory essay to his work, written by artist Doug Harvey:
"Bondage may be considered, on the one hand, a ritualized microcosmic reclamation of the socially and politically monopolized privilege of boundary-definition (i.e. Who gets to say where I leave off and everything else begins?), and on the other an entirely evolutionarily designed tool for the psychological management of the big-brained human complications of the fundamental organic process of growth."
Spiffy. Now you know.
-AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY-
crook, to be or feel == to feel unwell.
--E. J. Fischer
(Current location: Sydney, Australia)
Jun. 30th, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
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| » E.J.i.A.: Day 2 |
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 13, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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I am sitting on a bench in the Sydney botanical garden, writing this in my pocket journal (thank you, Meredith) for transcription when I get back to my computer. There is a breeze blowing in from the bay that is almost cool enough for me to need my jacket. There are people lounging, sunbathing, and reading on the grass. There are tall-masted sailboats rocking on the water. There are worse places to spend an afternoon.
--Yesterday--
My second day in Sydney was primarily spent getting of the last of my jet lag and orienting myself in the city. I woke up around 9:30, but didn't make it out of the house until nearly noon, my morning spent organizing my room in Howard and Jill's house and writing to you. Howard decided it was a good idea to familiarize myself with Sydney's public transportation systems, so we took a ferry from Manly to Circular Quay. Though we were sitting at the top level of the very large boat, the ride was sufficiently rough that we actually got wet. (Howard spoke excitedly about subtle and interesting combinations of "chop" and "roll," while Jill commented that she had never seen it that rough before, so they must have turned it on for me.) From Circular Quay we took the train (read "subway") to Darling Harbour, and from there just sort of walked around, taking shelter in the narrow shadow of the monorail track when the sun came out. Jill and Howard criticized each other for not having a plan for what to show me, until we wandered out of Darling Harbour and I spotted a store called Comic Kingdom and announced I was going there.
This comic book store was both awesome and sad. It was awesome in that it was very well stocked, and had things like back issues of Grant Morrison Doom Patrol in the 50 cent rack. It was sad in that everything new was easily twice as expensive as it would have been in the U.S. They had several graphic novels that I wanted, but I bought only one, due to the increased price. I encountered a pair of comic book readers from the Gold Coast, for whom coming into Sydney to this store was a treat. I advised them that if they ever plan to visit the U.S., it would be financially advantageous to make a comic book wish list first.
Of course, Howard and Jill didn't go into Comic Kingdom with me. They went to a cafe down the block and had coffee. After I left the store I joined them at their table, and just as I sat down, Jill suddenly clutched at her cellphone and purse possessively. I turned to discover a beggar with a massive, unkempt beard had approached us to, well, beg. I mention this because I realized that he was the first person I had seen in Sydney with a beard. As the day went on, I started looking out for other men with beards, and saw a few. Other beggars. The bearded population of Sydney seems to consist of homeless people, and me.
At five o'clock I met RoBecca on the steps of city hall, to go shopping for used books in another part of Sydney, an area called Newtown, which is near some of the universities and is kind of alternative and trendy. Sadly, none of the bookstores had anything particularly interesting. (Well, one had BERLIN: CITY OF STONES, but apparently even used graphic novels are exorbitant in Oz.) We also stopped into the arthouse theater, called Dendy, to see what was playing. The last movie I saw before leaving the states was one of their "coming soon" posters. Even though I have gone a day into the future by crossing the international date line, I have somehow managed to go back in time.
Eventually it got dark, and Bec took me back to Howard and Jill's house. And then today happened. But I will write about it later, when it has finished happening. I'm also going to try to think of ways to make these letters more fantastically entertaining, and less "the mundanities of my day, let me show you them." To that end: NEW FEATURE!!!!
***AUSTRALIAN SLANG OF THE DAY***
"Mackers" == McDonalds
--E. J. Fischer
(Current Location: Sydney, Australia)
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Note from the future: I later discovered that I should have spelled that "maccas."
Jun. 30th, 2008 @ 12:41 am
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| » E.J.i.A.: Day 1 |
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The following was originally sent as email to family and friends on December 12, 2007 while I was traveling in Australia. I am reposting my travel journal here while I attend the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, the organizers of which have requested that students not blog about the program.
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Day 1.
I landed in Sydney yesterday at around 8:30 am local time, after approximately 21 hours of traveling from San Antonio (during which I slept, perhaps, 2). After getting through customs, my job was to find a man wearing a blue baseball cap that said, "Death Valley" on it. This was Howard Chambers, there with his wife Jill, whose house I am staying at. They took me for a driving tour of downtown Sydney, with obligatory photo in front of the opera house. Downtown Sydney looks like it ranks up there with Picadilly Circus in London as urban centers you can have a blast just walking through. I also got to experience the start of what would be a full day of Howard and Jill arguing about driving directions, which they do constantly, but cheerfully and with little animosity. So it was fun in a "ho ho, they never agree!" way, rather than creepy in a "I'm trapped in a car with strangers who hate each other" way.
After touring downtown we started towards their house so I could wash the airplane off of me and change my clothes. On our way there, Howard unexpectedly turned around and announced, "E. J., you are going to be eating rue tonight." That actually *was* kind of creepy, and sounded very ominous until about ten seconds later, when a part of my brain that had apparently already gone to sleep woke back up for long enough to translate "rue" into "roo." As in, kangaroo. As in, "E. J., tonight we will be having kangaroo meat for dinner." Awesome. My first night in Australia, I'm totally going to eat a kangaroo.
After getting to Howard and Jill's house and freshening up I felt massively better, though still pretty tired. Howard and Jill told me they were taking me out to the golf club that Howard is a member of for lunch, which I mentally corrected to mean dinner, because I felt like I was only a couple of hours away from passing out. But no, they meant lunch. At the club I had a hamburger, as it is eaten in Australia: covered in beets. (Beetroot, as they call it.) It was good. The club itself is next to an area called Long Reef, and after a meal during which I was clearly fading from consciousness, Howard announced it would do me good to take a walk through the sunshine and fresh air. Fortuitously, the sun had actually come out for the first time all day while we were eating, and so we set off on a walk down Long Reef.
It was my stated intention before I left on this trip that I was going to focus mostly on urban pleasures and leave the exploration of natural wonder for some other time. This was due to the assumption that natural wonder required venturing away from the cities, out into the bush. This, at least in the case of Sydney, turns out to be completely wrong. Long Reef is a promontory of red rock sticking out into the Tasman sea, and at low tide it is surrounded by rock flats and tidal pools that teem with sea snails and crabs and thing like that. From the top or from the shore, it is painfully beautiful, and every time that my hosts seemed on the verge of saying we didn't have to continue, it is I who insisted we press on. Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me (not thinking I needed pictures of a golf club), and so I didn't get to capture any of this beauty. But I've already promised I will return.
On our way back to the car we passed the catering van for a television program that was going to be shooting on Long Reef later in the day. We talked to the woman setting up the tables, and she told us that it was for HOME AND AWAY, apparently a soap opera type show for teenagers that is popular in Australia and England, but hasn't caught on in America, which is just as well as "Americans wouldn't get it anyway." I decided I might as well give it a pass, then.
The rest of the day is something of a haze for me, as important parts of my personality shut off and went into storage around this time, though Howard and Jill promised they would keep me awake until after 9 to fight off jet lag, bless them. We did a driving tour of some other lovely beaches, then went home for a while. I laid down to rest, and when I got up, Jill's niece Rebecca (or Becca, or Becko, or Becks, or B.E.K.: Robot From The Future, as she is interchangeably called by family) had shown up. She is my age, and just got her degree in early childhood education. We talked for a while about the Australian educational system vs. the American educational system while Howard grilled beef and roo and Jill made potatoes and pumpkin and salad and asparagus. At some point Jill's son, Tim, showed up. He seems nice, and I am kind of afraid I seemed to him like a dick, because I was so exhausted by the time that he met me that all I could do to try and be sociable was make "ha ha! I'm so tired! I can't follow anything you're saying!" jokes. Hopefully I will get another chance to seem human around him soon. We talked about drinking, and music, and I ate kangaroo, and then I went to bed.
Day one in Australia: Complete.
Status: alive.
Bonus items discovered: 1/4.
Total Score: 3174
**PRESS START TO GO TO NEXT ROUND**
--E. J. Fischer
(Current location: Sydney, Australia)
Jun. 28th, 2008 @ 09:02 pm
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| » The Next Four Weeks |
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In three days I will start my attendance at Clarion, which will last the next six weeks. Clarion requests that students not blog about the workshop while it is going on, and the amount of writing I'll be doing as part of being a student there probably wouldn't leave me any time to post here anyway. But it occurs to me that I have about a month's worth of personal writing that I have never made public: from mid-December to mid-January I was in Australia, and while I was there I kept an email journal for family and friends. I've looked back through that journal, and there is nothing in it that I would feel uncomfortable posting in a public forum, so it is my intention to virtually relive my Australia adventure here during the first four weeks of Clarion. Some of my LJ friends will have read these emails already, but hopefully I was entertaining enough that they won't fault me too much for filling up their friends page with reruns.
So, in real life (and maybe in the occasional facebook status) I will be improving my fiction writing skills, but on this livejournal I will spend the next four weeks exploring Australia.
Jun. 26th, 2008 @ 07:58 pm
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| » Chelsea Clinton |
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She's here, and about to speak. I'll let you know if she says anything interesting
EDIT:
"First, my mother wants it to be very clear that we are going to unite our party...she is going to make a speech tomorrow in support of senator Obama."
Besides that, she said nothing of substance, just that local politics is important, national politics is important, and we should register new voters. And a lot of thank-yous. Her three introductions were each longer than her comments. The last introduction ended with, "It is my pleasure to introduce my Facebook friend, Chelsea Clinton," which was kind of weird.
Jun. 6th, 2008 @ 07:51 pm
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| » Big Purple Texas |
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In a few hours I will get in my car and head to Austin for the state Democratic convention, and it has me thinking about Texas politics in general. Even as I made the choice this year to become politically involved at a level beyond merely caring and voting, I was looking toward November and wondering if any of the work I did at the local level had a chance of being meaningful in the general election. This is Texas, after all, and while there was definitely meaningful work to be done at the primary level, I still can't drive to the Democratic party office without passing pickup trucks bearing Bush/Cheney '04 bumper stickers. For the past eight years there has been no more solidly Republican state in the country. And yet, maybe I've just drunk the Kool-Aid, but as my inbox fills up today with party emails bearing this year's unofficial slogan, "Turn Texas Blue!" I can't help but think that it doesn't seem like as much of a long shot as it has in the past.
The unprecedented turnout for the Democratic primaries has been well reported, but the scale of it in Texas over previous years is truly astonishing. The Austin convention, with an expected attendance of 15,000, will be the largest Democratic convention in the country, including the national convention. In fact, the campaigns have sent observers and plan to use the Texas convention as a model for the national convention for strategy planning purposes. (There are a lot of rumors about either Hillary or Barack making an appearance on Saturday, though a lot of us hope that they won't. The infrastructure of credentialing 15,000 people is going to be annoying enough without the security needed for a major candidate visit added on top.) One of the exciting things we will do at the convention is, hopefully, re-elect our state party chair, under whose two-year watch the party has come within five seats of having a majority in the state house of representatives. (Yes, the Republicans control the house in Texas by only five seats. Shocking, I know.) Rick Noriega seems well poised to present a formidably challenge to John Cornyn this year. In short, things are looking up.
Even as I type all that, though, the part of me that has been beaten down for nearly a decade now scoffs. The part that says being a liberal in Texas is living in enemy territory, I am a resident of the Red State King. But I want to say that's just the past eight years talking. Yes, there is the Texas legislator from the panhandle who says that Obama wouldn't want to be caught in his district after sundown, but I want to believe that, gerrymandering be damned, a mobilized Austin and San Antonio and Dallas and Houston can turn the tide. The countryside here is tinged with purple for the first time in recent memory, and it feels like a positive thing to let go of some cynicism and let myself begin believing in it.
Jun. 5th, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
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| » Thoughts on Barack Obama Clinching the Democratic Nomination |
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I'm an Obama supporter. I have contributed a great deal of time to his campaign. I have made phone calls, helped draft legal challenges, attended meeting after meeting. In two days I will attend the Texas Democratic Convention in Austin to represent the Obama voters of Senate District 25. I usually get all of my news from the internet and from public radio, but tonight I camped out at my parents' house to watch MSNBC as my candidate collected the last delegates he needed to clinch the Democratic nomination for president. Over the course of the evening I got to watch John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and finally Barack Obama address their respective supporters, and what I heard reinforced my commitment to the prospect of an Obama presidency.
I first became politically aware in my early teens. In 2000 I supported Al Gore (and was pissed that my 18th birthday was a few days to late to vote in the election) and in 2004 I supported Howard Dean (and eventually voted for John Kerry). I have always paid close attention to candidates' speeches, and after listening to a speech (or, in the case of Bush, reading a transcript--I can't stand listening to him speak) I play the "what do I wish that speech had been" game. I determine the message my ideal candidate would have for me in the relevant situation and on the relevant topics, and I judge them based on the degree to which they deviate from my ideal. Tonight I watched John McCain stumble through a self-defeating attempt to re-characterize his public perception. Then I watched Hillary Clinton deliver what was essentially an ultimatum to Obama to make room for her continued involvement, couched in the language of boosterism. And then Barack Obama announced his victory in a speech that shocked me: it was exactly the speech I wanted to hear.
Even Obama, whom I'm more excited about than I have been about any other candidate, often chooses to express things that I find wanting. Most commonly: religious sentiment. I'm an atheist, and ideally I'd like my candidate to be as well. Even ending a speech with "God bless America" grates on me. (Hillary's "I've often felt every vote for me was a prayer" was painful both for being religious and for being so obviously disingenuous.) But tonight Obama didn't even step on my toes in this regard. He was magnanimous in victory, acknowledging the accomplishments of his opponents and thus shaping the discourse in a positive manner. He didn't restrict himself to playing to his campaign strengths, he discussed issues on the basis of their importance to the nation. He mentioned commitment to scientific research in a major speech. He ended with a message of impassioned optimism that might, in other eras, seem trite but resonates very strongly in the wake of eight years of Bush politics. It was perfect.
Being a part of the Obama campaign is already something I am proud of. After listening to him tonight I am more confident than ever that he will successfully unify the Democratic party and, hopefully, win the white house in November.
Jun. 4th, 2008 @ 12:06 am
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| » My Path to Differential Equations Success |
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Some time in 2005 I was studying for my Differential Equations final exam, thinking to myself, "I can have a computer solve all of these problems for me. I will never do this again." I had thought this in frustration many times throughout my mathematical education, and to be honest it was getting less and less true as the math got more advanced. This time, though, I followed that thought up with another one that hadn't previously occurred to me: if computers can be given explicit instructions that allow them to solve differential equations, I should be able to write down similarly explicit instructions for myself. Verbalizing the specific steps necessary to solve the problems I was working on seemed like a good study activity. Additionally, I was allowed a page of notes to use on the exam, so if I could organize the steps so that they all fit on a page I could actually use this work during the test. I ended up spending a couple of hours in a study room with my textbook and a pad of graph paper, creating a flowchart for solving second order linear differential equations with constant coefficients. I tied with one other student for the highest grade on the final.
Recently I've been playing with Ubuntu, and as a way of gaining some familiarity with the OpenOffice suite of productivity apps I decided to create a digital version of my SOLDE flowchart. It is sized to fit on a sheet of 8.5x11 paper, and I am releasing it under creative commons license. If you think it would be of use to you, or know others who might like to use it, feel free to email it, print it out, pass it around. I think it might make a good handout for differential equations students. (It's under a share-alike license, so you can make derivative works as well, provided they are also creative commons licensed. One possible improvement might be to create a flowchart for variation of parameters, which gets glossed over on this one.)
( How to Solve Second Order Linear Differential Equations with Constant Coefficients )
May. 14th, 2008 @ 12:42 am
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| » The Death of my Dog |
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It has taken me a while to write about this.
Muffy. March 15, 1988 - February 28, 2008.
( Read more... )
Apr. 24th, 2008 @ 10:27 pm
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| » Clarion Writers' Workshop |
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I have been accepted into the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop class of 2008. This is a famous course with a 40 year history of turning out some of the best SF writers around. I found out that I got in a little over a week ago, but those accepted were requested to refrain from publicizing their acceptance until the program was ready to announce the entire class. The instructors for this year are stellar:
Kelly Link
Neil Gaiman
James Patrick Kelly
Geoff Ryman
Nalo Hopkinson
Mary Anne Mohanraj
Apparently there were a record number of submissions this year (unsurprising, with that lineup), and I feel very lucky to have been chosen as one of the 18 students for the class of 2008. More than that, really; quite often I find myself in the middle of, say, cooking rice or shopping for a book, and suddenly I'm overpowered by joy and disbelief that I got accepted. This is already a fabulous experience, and the workshop doesn't even start for several months.
Apr. 3rd, 2008 @ 01:23 pm
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| » NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN |
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Several months ago I saw THERE WILL BE BLOOD, and my first comment upon leaving the theater was, "This should be a shoo-in for Best Actor and Best Picture." Well, it did win the first, but Best Picture went to the Coen brothers' movie NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. So, finally, tonight I went to see that.
It is terrible. Honestly, actually terrible. Very competently put together, of course, given the creators; but there were no redeeming qualities to the narrative whatsoever. The movie is a boring, pointless waste of time, filled with flat characters and stunningly meaningless reflections on morality and human behavior. (Would anything have been lost from the movie if the Sheriff character's scenes were removed entirely? I suspect not.) A 2005 article in the New Yorker about the Cormac McCarthy novel the movie is based on sums up my feelings about the adapted work almost perfectly: "Red Planet" by James Wood. Judging from this essay, the Coen brothers were remarkably faithful to their source.
That this should win best picture in the same year that THERE WILL BE BLOOD, a movie which made Paul Thomas Anderson seem like the reincarnation of Stanley Kubrick, was eligible is criminal.
Mar. 6th, 2008 @ 12:21 am
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| » An Unknown Hero of my Childhood |
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BoingBoing gadgets has an interview with Bjarne P. Tveskov, a man who I didn't know existed until today but who gave me countless hours of enjoyment in my youth by designing several of my favorite LEGO sets. I was a Space LEGO fanatic when I was a child, and owned most of the sets depicted in the image at the link. My all-time favorite LEGO set, the Space Police I Galactic Peace Keeper (6886), was designed by him. I think I had four of that one.
He has a website with a blog, but unfortunately it is in Dutch.
Feb. 12th, 2008 @ 05:29 pm
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| » Painting: Mandarin |
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I have purchased a painting. I encountered it when a couple my parents have been friends with for decades came into town and we all went out to eat at a restaurant called Cafe Paladar. It was mounted on the wall next to our table, and I spent the whole meal looking at it, and inquired as to the artist before I left. The chef/manager couldn't remember the artist's name, but gave me the contact information for the art dealer who handled the piece. The dealer informed me that the artist was a man named Mark Rue, and that the work was part of his "fishscapes" series. It is called Mandrian, and you can view it on his website.
This is the first time I've ever spent a serious amount of money on a piece of art. I've had it framed, and it is hanging in my living room. I'm quite pleased with it.
( The painting, hanging in my living room. )
Nov. 26th, 2007 @ 08:52 pm
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| » Super Mario Galaxy |
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My birthday was last Saturday, and as a surprise birthday gift, my girlfriend preordered Super Mario Galaxy for me. It came out yesterday. It's awesome, I commented shortly after I started it that it should be called Super Mario Perfect. But...I just beat the final Bowser encounter after about eight hours of play. And I only died about fifteen times total, with probably twelve of those deaths on two particular levels (Sweet Sweet Galaxy is a bitch). So now I'm trying to decide why it was so easy. It's possible that it isn't actually easier in terms of game design than Super Mario 64, but the controls are so much smoother that all the jumps that it takes five tries to get right in 64 you can do on the first try in Galaxy. Or its possible that I just have an easier time with variable gravity puzzles than I am supposed to. (The variable gravity level in Sonic Adventure 2 is among my favorite videogame levels of all time, despite the game itself being only marginally impressive. It's like that level got lost on its way to some other, better game.)
Still, the game world is huge, the gameplay thrilling, and after you beat the game (assuming you do so at the earliest opportunity) there are 59 more power stars to find. Rosalina says that finding them will open up "another world." So, back at it.
EDIT: Sure-fire trick for doing well in Super Mario Galaxy: the second you get to a place where the controls seem unintuitive, think to yourself that forward moves toward the top of the screen, back moves toward the bottom of the screen. The controls will then start making sense again.
Nov. 14th, 2007 @ 02:41 pm
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