how (and a little bit of why)...

the time has come, i've decided, to actually provide something of an explanation. i've alluded a number of times to going travelling and i think it's appropriate that i discuss how i came to make this decision.

years and years ago, in a past life, certain friends and i discussed the idea of going on a worldwide odyssey. not necessarily the same one mind, more getting into the concept and how we'd all go about it. some time later i moved across the country in search of a new life, new opportunities, and hopefully people who hadn't heard of me already. i had mixed success on all three counts, but one way or another things wound up working out pretty well.

back at the beginning of 2007 i finally got around to leaving the country, spending 5 days in Singapore with a couple of friends, getting thoroughly adopted by a Hokkien familiy over there and completely loving the culture and vibe of the place. a few months later i wound up back together with the girl i'd spent a couple of years living with, which lasted until around October or November before it started going cold for reasons i couldn't quite understand at the time. just before the final crunch happened i went to Fiji to visit Moonbug, old friend who'd been living and working there for half the year. Moonbug's incredible - while she was at uni she did a number of shitty jobs (which nonetheless paid well) so that she could pay her way through, and come out the other side with a slush fund which she used to go around the world for something lik 6 months. she's been damn-near everywhere as far as i can tell.

Fiji was awesome fun for the most part. i spent days swimming in the clear waters and wandering around the island, and nights getting roaringly drunk with backpackers from all over the planet trading stories and realising quietly that i was being so completely outclassed that it wasn't funny. there was NO way i could compete with these people, most of whom had spent at least 6 months wandering before they got to this tiny little island in the South Pacific.

i flew out of Nadi the day before New Years Eve with an impressive tan, a backpack full of Fijian booze and a quiet melancholy because 3 nights on a desert island with a great bar is never enough. i had a 3 hour stopover in Sydney before my connecting flight home so i checked in with Shadow who'd agreed to give me a lift home. through an amusing coincidence his brother and family were on the same flight out of Sydney as i was (he was moving back to Australia from London and had just spent the last 24 hours in Hong Kong before flying in to Sydney) and he had an idea. we discussed the plan, tuned it a bit, and i took up station in the departure lounge at Kingsford Smith with my book and waited. it wasn't even 20 minutes before i see this couple stagger into the lounge being towed by a ridiculously energetic 3 year old. i was lucky enough to have seen photos of her, at least, previously, so i instantly knew it was them, so i surreptitiously sent the message "Contact. Call me now."

15 seconds later my phone was ringing, and i let it ring a couple of times before i answered with
"hello? yes, they're here. please hold..."
and walked across the lounge, phone in hand. we were the only people there at this point, so i should explain - i was wearing black shoes, black jeans, a black tshirt and dark sunglasses, my hair was slicked back and i'd shaved the night before in the hotel in Nadi, so i wasn't looking too scruffy, and at 6'3", i must have cut a fairly imposing figure to someone who'd spent the last 48 hours travelling, so when i walked up, looked Tauss in the eye and in a deep voice asked:
"Excuse me, Mr M__ C__?"
he looked visibly freaked, but admitted "Er, yeah?"
"Ah. Phone for you." at which point i handed the phone over and gave his shocked-looking wife a quick wink as a silent "don't worry". the next thing i hear is
"Um... hello?" and then HEEEEEYYYY! HOW YOU DOIN?!?

joke played, i wound up spending the next hour or so hanging out with these poor people i'd freaked the hell out of. it turned out that Tauss had gone over to the UK for 6-12 months, 7 years ago, and was now bring his wife and 3-year old daughter back to Australia.

back home again, and things were still pretty cold with my ex, although it was still a couple of days before i found out that the reason she'd been so cold was because she'd hooked in with a new boyfriend. about 2 months ago. and hadn't thought it worth telling me until i asked. lovely.

i'd like to say i was shattered, but that would be overexagerating the truth. i was already pretty messed around and this was actually pretty good. i mean, i was upset, but at least now i knew what the hell was going on and it made things easier. at the same time as all this my job was getting particularly intollerable and i was getting ground into the dirt by the people i worked for, so i was in a seriously wrecked state all told.

either way, it wasn't long after this that i started talking to people about the idea of getting out of the country for a while. Britain was the first choice because... well, we speak the same language, for a start, i've always wanted to spend some time there eventually and it's an easy gateway to the rest of Europe. one evening i was talking to Paul & Lou about it while we sat around drinking wine out on their balcony and when i went to leave she walked me down to my car so that she could tell me that she's wanted to go over there since she was 16 and just hadn't had the opportunity and... well, if i went could she come with?

i was a bit surprised at this one. i was also a bit worried since Paully and i are pretty good mates, which is why a week or two later when Lou was out of the house i sat him down over beers and had a chat with him about my intentions, or lack thereof. that out of the way, and 50 or so emails back and forth over a couple of weeks and we had a plan. i headed off to Singapore, and this time Thailand and 2 weeks after i got back things were set in stone, tickets purchased and i had plans to move out of the (disintegrating, screaming hellhole of a) sharehouse i'd been living in for nearly 4 years, selling off most of my possessions in the process, and take up a spare room in Paully's flat.

amusingly enough, this isn't the first time i've had things to sour in the town i lived in and gone Some Where Else in search of something new. it's how i got came to move out of the place i'd grown up in and come out to this end of the world. it's been suggested that i do this because it seems easier than trying to fix things where i am. really, though, there comes a time where you've exhausted a part of the world and need to give it time to recharge. i'll go back west eventually. i'll come back to the land of the Ngunnerwal at some stage. right now, before i'm 30 and can still get an easy working-visa, is the point at which i need to go and do this sort of thing, even if it means that i dump my profession for a while and work in a bar or something. i'm not expecting to have to or anything - techies are (from what i've been reading) in even stronger demand in the UK than they are here.

still, i've got the opportunity and the ability to go see the world so what the hell? i figure that it's when everything falls apart that it's by far the easiest time to let climb out of the rubble and walk away to explore something new. it's almost as if one change begets another, bigger one.

now i just have to wait a little longer - 3 months and a week, to be more or less precise - and i'll be flying out again, off on another adventure which will take me to fuck-knows where. my last adventure went in directions i'd completely not expected, so this time i'm going with as few as possible. i want to see just how outlandish this all can get...

Snippets #3: on narcissism...

the thought occurred to me as i walked through the rain this evening, my worn old boots clumping on the pavement, that blogging has to be one of the most narcissistic endeavours accessible to the average citizen in the current milieu. it goes beyond the basic greed, pride and vanity that you used to see on the streets and pubs and clubs when you decided to head out on the town. it's a quiet whimper expressed by the hopeless and condemned, a desperate need for recognition, a misguided belief that there are people out there who truly love them for the delicate, utterly (banal) unique (mass-produced, Macdonalds-engorged) snowflake they are and want to know what they had for lunch today, what music they're currently ignoring and what their goals and aspirations are for the weekend. it's the one thing i can think of which out-ranks Selection Criteria writing in terms of pure self-serving self-indulgence.

and it's addictive. it's the safe scream into the abyss for people who are too terrified to leave the sanctity of their troglodytic minds and realise their own insignificance. it's easy - you can do it from your bedroom, your office, your fucking car when you're stopped at the lights if you can comprehend it. it's for people who don't realise that the rest of the world cares as little for them as they do for the lad serving their dinner who studied for his Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Bangkok and now works as a barman and cook at the local chinese restaurant because no fucker will give him a better job in this country (even though his english is almost as good as theirs), not that he cares much since he earns a better wage doing that in Sydney than he would as an accountant in Thailand... but i digress. it's as accessible as typing "blogging site" into google, waving your finger blindly at the screen and picking whatever it lands on. you can set one up in under 5 minutes and get stuck straight into what a whore the checkout bitch at the supermarket was who kept staring at your boyfriend's nipple piercings and I'M SO FUCKING SPECIAL BECAUSE MARYLIN MANSON'S "ANTICHRIST SUPERSTAR" MAKES ME FEEL THAT WAY AND ANYWAY I LOVE HIM SOO MUCK AND I WANTS TO HAVE HIS BABNIES!1!

and before you start screaming "hypocrite", i'd like to give you a travel brochure for a wonderful holiday destination called Hell. i suggest you go there. i was as bad as the rest of them, back in the day. i had a blog back before Live Journal was famous and by the time i finally lost the spark i'd written a small book's worth of words (over 260,000), freely accessible to young and old. i had a look through a few pages of what i produced a couple of months ago and i was surprised - partly because it reminded me of some of the insignificant events that occurred and how they effected me at the time, as well as how fucking horrible my prose was.

and the only reason i'm back is because a nice lady asked me to. i could have written emails and spammed them out to a mailing list, but the request was to "start a new blog" and so... well, she asked politely and i'm loathe to refuse a reasonable polite request like that. it may amuse you to know that i don't actually get any readership statistics from this site. i turned off all the options which would make my site come up on google or any google-related aggregators. i can't prevent yahoo from finding it, but i guess you can't win them all. i assume that there are people who read it because every now and then i get a comment from someone saying as much. i'm not sure whether i'd stop now that i'm started again. certainly, if i knew for sure that no one was reading i'd take it offline. i'd be able to write more freely, for a start, and not have to filter the content so that people don't get upset when i give them a serve.

that all said, i AM glad that i've been given the impetus to start writing again though. i used to enjoy it and i need the practice. i just wish it didn't make me One Of Them, that's all...

a defence mechanism and a reconstructive behavioral disorder...

i've been a bit pissed off and depressed of late - for no reason in particular, just a general malaise which has come over me quietly like fog falls silently over a sleeping city. by monday it was starting to really knock me around when an idea popped into my head... not a solution per se, more a distraction: i was going to fix things.

i do that. i like fixing things. i've been accused in the past of fixing things as a defence mechanism - a way of making people like me. superficially this is somewhat accurate. past that it's really more that i like to make things work that once were broken, and it's something i've found i'm good at which gives me a buzz. since monday morning i've been fixing things like nobody's business. first i got stuck into some problems at work which a bunch of other techs had tried to fix and failed and proceeded to kick the shit out of them. i've started fixing Lou's bike - that's going to be a long-haul project, but we've made a good start of it. i spent an hour writing some little scripts to keep my music and photos synchronised between my computers. i dropped in on Matt and Jules where i got to meet Marcus (who's a touch over 2 weeks old) and wound up fixing M's computer... then took his MP3 player away so that i could fix it tonight. this evening i did a bodge job on my bike that'll have to hold until a replacement part comes in before sitting down at the coffee table and stripping M's little Creative Zen down and putting it back together again.

i get paid a fairly obscene quantity of money to make broken things work. you'd think that i'd want no part of it when i got home - well you thought wrong. you see, it seems that i can't build anything worth a damn, but REbuilding? that i can do...

it's all a distraction though. i'm not sure what i'm waiting for, but i know i'm just marking time. i'm putting one foot in front of another while i trudge towards what looks like a featureless horizon, cramming books into my brain, rebuilding machinery and making computers sing. filling the gaps in my life with activities that make me believe, for a fleeting, happy moment, that my breathing in and out isn't wasting someone else's oxygen.

hanging with Shadow has been good though. he seems to have worked out that i'm happiest when i have something to make work or make better, so he's always coming up with little tasks i can complete for him. they're always useful and sometimes they're even a challenge, but i always wind up getting to do something constructive and walking out the door with a smile on my face. good friends will pick you up when you fall down. great friends, on the other hand, will make it feel like you managed it all on your own...

Snippets #2: on leadership...

anyone who's been paying attention would have seen aphorisms here and there about how some people are great, and some have greatness thrust upon them, but greatness isn't what i'm talking about here so put that out of your head. i just find it interesting that when you have a group of people working together on some task, great or small, that when there's no one person in the group with the assigned task of leading, someone will tend to assume the role. personally i've never REALLY sought it out, regardless of what some of my detractors may say. it's just that i get so pissed off that no one else will step up that i've got into the habit and have wound up taking the reins in one way or another again and again and again.

sometimes it's been out of boredom, othertimes frustration. over the last couple of weeks i've gone and started coordinating the guys i work with in a general attempt to stop everyone from tripping over their own feet, and a hope that i can get them working as an actual team rather than a 50/50 split of workaholics and slackers, with me sitting in the middle just trying to get through my days. it's worth noting that this is not what i signed up for here. i just wanted to sit around the office and fix things for a few months while my days trickled away and my savings account waxed quietly in the corner.

it kinda makes me wonder a little whether there's not something more to it - that i might actually be a closet control-freak and glory-hound. i wonder how much it actually matters one way or the other.

oh well. i'm having fun with it at the moment and i seem to be making some positive changes around the place. morale's on the up, and the team's working more cohesively than it was a month ago so i think i'll keep nudging things along until i get sick of the idea or i leave... the worst that can really happen is that someone gives me some actual responsibility and makes me actually attend meetings or something. now that would get awkward - i've got in the habit of putting my feet up on my desk while i'm working and that can look bad on the boardroom table...

at some point, though, i think i'm going to have to take an honest-to-gods Team Leader job so that i can crash and burn and prove once and for all that i'm not cut out for it. heaven-forbid that i somehow do WELL - if that happened i'd get completely incorrigible and there'd be no stopping me...

antipathy for all in its totality...

i am not in the mood, and it's getting late so i will be brief. actually brief, unlike when Brother Whatever His Name Was in high school (i went to a Christian Brothers high school, but escaped from the experience vaguely normal you'll be pleased to hear) would say those 5 words and everyone would get comfortable and try to get some sleep in the ensuing half-hour's boredom. many things happened yesterday. most of them were good. a couple of them i am cleared to discuss below:

• Marcus Alan Michael K was born at 4:52PM, a little over 2 weeks late, but healthy nonetheless. Jules is recovering from the (emergency) C-section in hospital with Matt sleeping on a fold-out in the room. i went to visit them today and spent the 20 minutes we waited around on the other side of a curtain (there was privacy required), so i've not actually seen the sprog, but i HAVE seen photos and he looks... well, like they all look really. the corruption officially begins as soon as he's old enough to tell one end of a comic book from the other and hold a console controller.
  
• Rick and Kandace have (finally) gotten engaged after... um... something like 8 years. awwww...
  
• on the day once of my friends is giving birth, Ctrl+Alt+Del published a comic where once of the characters miscarries. how's that for unfortunate timing? Tim Buckley's credit, he carried the strip off spectacularly.
  

other things happened yesterday too. i went to work as an example, and once again completely failed to be killed on the roads. i ate, drank, slept and did the usual sorts of things one might consider doing in the hours they're awake. this is more or less what i've been doing for the last fortnight, interspersed with the watching of Stanley Kubrik movies (i finally got around to watching Dr Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket), Battlestar Galactica and the reading of various literature... most of it comics.

i've been tired, often irritated with the world in general, and generally apathetic towards anything that might be considered to be constructive. still, i'm saving cash at above the projected rate and this is a reason for cheer. at some point soon i'll be spending far too much of it on the likes of flights to and from Melbourne and Perth, and perhaps even frivolities such as socks and trousers.

otherwise i'm keeping busy doing the "work" thing and not dying on my way to or from same, which is better than i can say for the occupants of the 5 cars crushed front-to-back on Hindmarsh Drive today. judging by the wreckage it looked like there was a good likelihood that someone wasn't going home tonight, although hopefully i'm mistaken. people just do not take enough care in the wet, and obviously don't pay enough attention at the best of times. still, with luck the ones at the back were all insured and it'll all end well... well, except for the insurance companies and (who matters) no one really cares about them.

meanwhile, i'm going to sleep.