Northern Lights

It was starting to get cooler in Sydney the day I left. It was a little tough leaving, but not the worst farewell. I had lost one of my birthday earrings that Mr Wiggins gave me (sapphire), and as I was loading my things into the trunk of the car, he came running up to me with a funny and unexpected grin.

"What's going on?" I asked, because normally he gets moody when I leave.

He opened his hand, and there, mysteriously, was the missing earring. We had searched his entire flat for it, with no luck, and then he found it on the front step the day I was to leave.

I put it on. We both smiled most of the way to the airport.

LAX is a nightmare. It made me just dislike 99.9% of the human race. It's so poorly designed to handle the amount of people going through it. There was no room in the Customs/Immigration area, and there were only 2 plane loads of people there. And then everyone had to make it worse by jostling and sneakily attempting to cut ahead in the queue. (Look at me, I'm all warped just from three weeks in Australia. I think "queue" instead of line.) And this jerk behind me kept bumping me with his loaded cart full of luggage. Once or twice is forgiveable, but basically he was tailgating me with the thing because he couldn't stand to just be patient and wait in line going through customs. He had to get every millimeter ahead that he could, even if it involved hitting me in the calves every few seconds. At least it wasn't painful, just annoying. If he had caused pain, I would have had to belt him.

Being home is weird. Everything just waited for me. Except for being warmer, everything is pretty much exactly as it was. That feels a bit funny. I don't know what to think. I haven't been able to get DSL working. Catch 22: In order to get DSL working, I need to boot up my server and access the DSL modem to configure it. But my server doesn't seem to be booting up because of something to do with the network not working yet. I might bring the DSL modem to work and see if I can configure it here, then take it home and try again. Hopefully in the next few days the server should be back and in working order, and ARJLog will go back to it's normal location.

Anzac Day

It looks like I sort of flaked out about Earth Day this year. Not that I really "celebrate" it. But I believe in having at least a day devoted to focusing on this ball of magma and rock and dirt and sand and bacteria and algae and ginkgo trees and mosquitos and aardvarks and monkeys and fruit bats that's flying around in space. Connecting/ reconnecting with the earth is good. I think I understand in a symbolic way why Genesis says that Adam was made from clay.

In lieu of Earth Day, I experienced my first Anzac Day. Anzac stands for, I think, Australian/ New Zealand Armed Corps, and is akin to Memorial Day in the States. Gallipoli gets mentioned a lot. People walk around with sprigs of rosemary (for remembrance). There are parades and lots of old wrinkled veterans waving beatifically.

It may seem like a hypocritical stance for a pacifist, but I respect holidays like these, and I respect the sacrifice made by those who believed something was worth dying for. I don't necessarily agree with causes or methods involved in wars, but I respect the dedication of someone who believes so fiercely in something he or she will suffer the horrors of war and possibly loss of life to protect it or further it. (There's not much I would die for, except maybe my family, if I could be convinced that my death would actually acheive a fruitful end.) At the same time, I sort of paradoxically just think of the whole thing as sad. It's not a very uplifting kind of holiday for me. It's a reflective one. I can't say whether or not I think lives are truly wasted in war, but I do tend to play the what-if game... I can't help wondering what would have happened if all those people hadn't been blown apart.

I remember visiting Washington, D.C. with my parents during our 3 month tour of the United States. One of our stops was the Vietnam Memorial, and my dad looked up a name or two he knew on the Wall. I was seven years old, he'd never really spoken to me of the war, but it was an odd moment for me. We toured a lot of the east coast that summer, and I remember at one point complaining to my parents about getting sick of all the Civil War memorials everywhere, all the old death still hanging around. Old cannons, old bullets, old body counts. I think that was a really formative moment for me. I think that war memorials serve as something my dad would call a "good bad example" for me, and that's how I will always think of them.

The Mystery of the Blogger's Upset Stomach

After browsing around, I saw that Shelley of Burningbird and Jonathon Delacour both had illnesses earlier this week. More suspiciously, Mr Delacour had some kind of bad stomach thingy, and is Australian. I had a bad stomach thingy yesterday and I'm in Australia. Coincidence? I think not. It must be some kind of weird blogger karma because I don't link to him in my blogroll. Or something got into the water supply...

On the Other Side of the Pacific

Yesterday, after a slow, slow start, we got to the beach. I wanted to swim, but by the time we got there I was feeling rather ill and the waves were huge anyway-- a storm had just finished and another seemed to be rolling in. Still, it was nice to sit and read in the waning afternoon light, the air was mild and the sound of the waves comforting and familiar. The sand felt cool but didn't chill. There wasn't too much of a breeze. And the sky above kept changing her clothes, a woman in front of her wardrobe mirror, trying to figure out which outfit she wanted to wear for the evening.

We sat and read together until the light utterly failed and we were squinting to get a few more words in by the aid of the street lamps. Then we went and played pool, each won a game, and went home as I nearly passed out from stomach pain on the bus and train. Fortunately, the gastrointestinal uproar seems to have died down considerably today. Yesterday, all I could do was think of the lyrics to Every Day is Like Sunday. Silent and grey.

Here is the sky changing her clothes. Warning: Parental Advisory. The following may contain celestial nudity and spiritual situations.

More random Sydney pictures are here.

And Now for a Serious Moment

Well, I've been avoiding getting into talk about world events and the nightmare of the Middle East. Like Ellen Cherry in Skinny Legs and All, whenever I hear the topic come up, I want to think rugs. The whole situation is so lengthy, painful, convoluted, and unbearable that this little middle class protected American white girl just can't absorb the suffering properly. It's like trying to imagine infinity, but added to the forehead scrunching and the mysterious wonder of it is a loud, long, ragged, anguished scream that won't stop.

"It was an overload of craziness. It was a seventy-piece orchestra rehearsing a funeral dirge and a wedding march simulatneously in a broom closet. It was a firebug convention in a straw hotel....

"It's too complex, too confusing, she thought. Nobody'll ever straighten this damn mess out."

But I feel like I have an ethical obligation to weigh in with the other pacifists on the issue, even though so many are much more eloquent (Jeneane, Elaine, Burningbird, AKMA, Mike Golby, and others I didn't have time to find appropriate archived entries for). I don't believe war is ever a true solution to anything, it's a political answer to a philosophical problem, and it will only need to happen over and over and over again.

"Jerusalem. Jeru Salaam. 'City of Peace.' The only humorous thing about it was its name. Thirty-seven wars (not battles but wars) fought over it. Reduced to ashes seventeen times by seventeen different conquerors. Each time rebuilt-- and each time coveted anew....

"Jerusalem. Jeru Salaam. Shaped out of pure spirit, irrigated with spurting gore. Incessently blackened by arson and blood, only to be polished to a golden shine again by prayerful knees and unwinding scrolls of dreamlike prophecy. Jersusalem. When they could no longer bear to hear its children screaming, stones went deaf all over the world."

The weird thing to me about this Middle Eastern conflict is that this is just the newest chapter of a struggle that's been happening for thousands of years. How long does it have to take for people to see that no progress is being made? Perhaps progress isn't what they want. Maybe the violence has been going on for so many generations that it's somehow perversely familiar and comfortable to those on both sides who continue to generate it. Or maybe they just don't know any other way to behave. Or maybe there's no use trying to make any kind of sense of it.

"What a dull world this would be if we are all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another's peculiarities. We need only respect those peculiarities-- and to be grateful for them. Our similarities provide us with a common ground, but our differences allow us to be fascinated by one another."

So I send out my vibes of peace today, after reading about and seeing on television the horror in Jenin. It's getting to a point where people are becoming more and more the demonic side of human nature, and it's really bothering me. So I send out my small plea for people to let go of violence and hatred (it doesn't have to make anything tangible or practical happen, that's missing the point).

"The country of Palestine, which had been called Canaan, was named for Pales.

"Pales was a deity. The ass-god. Or the ass-goddess. Usually he was male, but sometimes she was female, and sometimes its gender was a tad ambivalent.

"The name Pales was Arabic... but the Hebrews loved the long-eared bisexual no less than the Arabs....

"The ass was a savior who provided milk, meat, shoe leather and transportation (what the Bible calls 'the golden calf' was actually the golden ass, since there were never many cows in the Levant).

"The ass was also obstinate, silly, and sexually crude.

"Embodying all of those characteristics, Pales was trickster, fertility spirit, and sacred clown, presiding over humankind's unruly passions, giving mortals what they needed, but not before having some fun with them....

"...[I]t ought to remind Arabs and Jews of their common roots, that once upon a time they worshipped the same deity and that this land they've fought over so bitterly was named after a braying ninny. And that that ought to tell them something. Among other things, it should tell them not to take themselves so seriously."

Maybe Boomer Petway's idea for taking the Arabs and Jews in Israel/Palestine down a notch with his statue is a little too lighthearted, too flippant when you consider the suffering and the deaths of countless men, women, and children, but there's certainly a point there. War would not be raging so unendingly, so furiously, if leaders and zealots did not take themselves and their beliefs so deadly seriously. My dad always says, "Life's too important to be taken seriously," and I think that applies to anything of importance. It should be taken with a dash of insight, a heaping teaspoonful each of humility and respect, but never ever taken so seriously.

Birthday Boys and Girls

Yesterday was Mr Wiggins' twenty-fourth. We went to the Museum of Sydney and saw the exhibit on Michael Leunig's cartoons. Smart, funny guy.

We had a barbecue at James' flat, who is Rachele's (Adam's sis) and Penny's (Adam's mum) boss at The Mad Greek (coffee shop).

Today is my mom's birthday. Happy birthday mom! I love you. She has been around the sun the same number of times as there are cards in a deck. She likes to play cribbage, gin, and rummy with me.

Same as Here, Only Dizzier

A long time ago, I sent an email to Voodoo Boy with this quote in it, and today I bumped into the story again. It's one of my most favorite.

Zia has a ring with a small spinning disc on it. Painted on the disc is a psychedelic coil that goes spiraling down into infinity. She keeps spinning it and the two of them stare down into the faraway place at the center of the spiral until the disc slows down, almost stops. Then Zia gives it another flick with her fingernail, and the coil goes spiraling down again.

"Where'd you get this anyway?" Maida asks.

Zia shrugs. "Can't remember. Found it somewhere."

"In someone's pocket."

"And you never did?"

Maida grins. "Just wish I'd seen it first, that's all."

They watch the disc some more, content.

"What do you think it's like down there?" Zia says after awhile. "On the other side of the spiral."

Maida has to think about that for a moment. "Same as here," she finally announces, then winks. "Only dizzier."

- Crow Girls, by Charles de Lint

The Dance of the Seven Veils

Tom Robbins' book Skinny Legs and All came out in 1990. Twelve years later, his observations on the history of and situation in the Middle East still seem relevant.

More relevant still are the truths revealed by Salome's dance of the seven veils, particularly:

• The futility of political solutions to humanity's problems.

  "Political problems did exist, all right, but they were entirely secondary. The primary problems were philosophical, and until the philosophical problems were solved, the political problems would have to be solved over and over and over again....

  "For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self....

  "Of course, as long as there were willing followers, there would be exploitive leaders. And there would be willing followers until humanity reached that philosophical plateau where it recognized that its great mission in life had nothing to do with any struggle between classes, races, nations, or ideologies, but was, rather, a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics was simply a roadblock of stentorian baboons."

• The valuation of money and the devaluation of things of importance

  "The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had because more valuable that the things themselves.

  "There then followed some fairly standard wisdom along the lines of how it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven (when one considered how often currency served as the paper representation of a big rigid ego, and how that heaven, on the other hand, was the loose state of egolessness, one saw what Jesus was driving at)..."

• Everybody's got to figure it out for themselves

  "The government wouldn't take care of it for you, no matter how much you'd paid into Social Security, or how many votes your political action committee may have bought. You couldn't learn it in college, colleges choose largely to ignore it. Churches, conversely, were falling all over themselves to save you the trouble of thinking about it; they would hand you an answer as neat and tidy and definitive as your horoscope in the daily paper-- and, unfortunately, just about as useless because it was just about as generic and every bit as speculative. Great books, paintings, and music were helpful, in an inspirational way; nature, even more so....

  "The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross."

On a slightly related note, read this graphic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Babycakes.