Published The Advocate, December 31, 2005
HERE we are at the cusp of another year but you have to remain optimistic. There is always something to live for. Check a desk calendar. Every day somewhere in the world, a public holiday is being celebrated. I saw a man with no arms standing by the side of the Bass Hwy at Somerset the other day. He was wearing a shoulder bag around his neck and had the half-expectant, half-pleading look of a hitchhiker. What makes a man with no arms think he can thumb a ride? Optimism. I take inspiration from his attitude. I wish to be the bald man who weekly pops his head into the barbershop and laughs to remind the barber of a lost sale. It’s a matter of seeing things differently. I love the cartoon of a fish telling the doubting wrasses: "I swear, I was seized by an alien who kissed me on the lips and threw me back." Sometimes I feel detached from life, like being in an aircraft where everyone else but me is wearing a headset and laughing at the in-flight movie and I have no idea why they are laughing. Here’s a thought: If something is funny enough to make you laugh, why can’t you keep on laughing at it? Why does the laughing stop? The joke is still funny and yet somehow its funniness runs out. Weird. Not laughing, more friends will die in 2006, as if 2005 was not bad enough. For years, my regular New Year’s resolution has been to make new friends. A good resolution, but not this time. I have reached the stage where I am reluctant to make new friends now because it will mean having to attend even more funerals later. I am also a contrarian. I like to do the unexpected. Everyone tells me death is inevitable, therefore I intend to hang around forever just to make a nuisance of myself. We shall see. Some days are too difficult to make considered, intelligent judgements, like stepping into a lift and being unable to decide whether to go up or down. There have also been days when I arrived at work covered in cobwebs, for which I have no explanation. But if your life is going around in bewildering circles, never mind, there are lots of people with chips on their shoulders who will tell you exactly where you are going wrong. They will pick faults in others but see none in themselves. Avoid them. So what does next year have in store? The weather will make the news again, of that I am certain. Tassie loves its weather stories. And for those parents who are worried their kids are too obsessed with winning in sport, there’s always Collingwood. My New Year resolution last year was to procrastinate more, to put off until tomorrow what I could not bothered doing yesterday. That’s ticked off the list when I get around to it. Next year I intend to continue the hunt for anatomically correct jelly babies.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Published The Advocate, December 24, 2005
IN THE United States, where the silly season grows sillier every year, some large evangelical churches have cancelled Christmas church services this year. They speak of "decentralising Christmas", of encouraging people to spend the day with their families around the Christmas tree, rather than coming together to worship as a congregation. Am I alone in finding this odd? Christmas is the one time of the year – not counting weddings and funerals – when even the lapsed are likely to be found in a church. It’s a sacred time. Most retailers, having commercialised Christmas to the last dollar, close their doors on Christmas Day itself. Churches, on the other hand, are expected to keep their doors open. To close the doors may be a consequence of running religion like a business, as many evangelical churches do, and it rather misses the point of being a church. It is hard to imagine the mainstream churches – Catholic, Protestant and so on – taking a breather on Christmas Day. Even if an alarmingly small number of people bother to turn up, the birth of Christ still seems a good reason to turn on the lights and arrange the flowers. Even non-believers respect the fact that Christmas is more than just another public holiday. I had a crusty old editor – a non-believer if ever there was one – who banned the word Xmas in copy even though it made a better fit than Christmas in a headline. He saw the X as offensive to many readers for taking the Christ out of Christmas. Only later did I learn X was the Greek character for Christ. Meantime, the secularisation of Christmas continues apace. Education minister Paula Wriedt said state schools, if they wished, could ban Christmas activities such as nativity plays, carols and decorations "given the diversity of the school population". Her critics took this as implicit approval for schools to ban Christmas altogether, and they labelled Ms Wriedt a grinch. However, the critics saw nothing wrong in their insisting that everyone must celebrate Christmas, or else. There is no getting away from the fact that Christmas is a Christian feast day, for Christ’s sake. The festive season can also be rough on a lot of people. It can be a sad reminder for those who have lost loved ones. It is also the suicide season and there is an upsurge in domestic violence and road fatalities. Sigh. Christmas, to me, is the time of the year when I sit in the lounge with the lights out listening to Handel’s version of Gloria rather than to Van Morrison’s G-L-O-R-I-AYY. My perfect day is to make the family calls early and then withdraw: the phone does not ring, no one comes knocking at my door and I can write another passage of my never ending book knowing I will not be interrupted. Bliss. My son’s partner is Jewish. Being Jewish, she says, means she is not required to give Christmas presents although nothing prevents her from receiving them. Ho-ho-ho. Anyway, from her perspective, all Christians are lapsed Jews.
IN THE United States, where the silly season grows sillier every year, some large evangelical churches have cancelled Christmas church services this year. They speak of "decentralising Christmas", of encouraging people to spend the day with their families around the Christmas tree, rather than coming together to worship as a congregation. Am I alone in finding this odd? Christmas is the one time of the year – not counting weddings and funerals – when even the lapsed are likely to be found in a church. It’s a sacred time. Most retailers, having commercialised Christmas to the last dollar, close their doors on Christmas Day itself. Churches, on the other hand, are expected to keep their doors open. To close the doors may be a consequence of running religion like a business, as many evangelical churches do, and it rather misses the point of being a church. It is hard to imagine the mainstream churches – Catholic, Protestant and so on – taking a breather on Christmas Day. Even if an alarmingly small number of people bother to turn up, the birth of Christ still seems a good reason to turn on the lights and arrange the flowers. Even non-believers respect the fact that Christmas is more than just another public holiday. I had a crusty old editor – a non-believer if ever there was one – who banned the word Xmas in copy even though it made a better fit than Christmas in a headline. He saw the X as offensive to many readers for taking the Christ out of Christmas. Only later did I learn X was the Greek character for Christ. Meantime, the secularisation of Christmas continues apace. Education minister Paula Wriedt said state schools, if they wished, could ban Christmas activities such as nativity plays, carols and decorations "given the diversity of the school population". Her critics took this as implicit approval for schools to ban Christmas altogether, and they labelled Ms Wriedt a grinch. However, the critics saw nothing wrong in their insisting that everyone must celebrate Christmas, or else. There is no getting away from the fact that Christmas is a Christian feast day, for Christ’s sake. The festive season can also be rough on a lot of people. It can be a sad reminder for those who have lost loved ones. It is also the suicide season and there is an upsurge in domestic violence and road fatalities. Sigh. Christmas, to me, is the time of the year when I sit in the lounge with the lights out listening to Handel’s version of Gloria rather than to Van Morrison’s G-L-O-R-I-AYY. My perfect day is to make the family calls early and then withdraw: the phone does not ring, no one comes knocking at my door and I can write another passage of my never ending book knowing I will not be interrupted. Bliss. My son’s partner is Jewish. Being Jewish, she says, means she is not required to give Christmas presents although nothing prevents her from receiving them. Ho-ho-ho. Anyway, from her perspective, all Christians are lapsed Jews.
Published The Advocate, December 17, 2005
STANDING in an airport queue provides plenty of time for self-assessment, to become more aware of who you are … except many things are not worth knowing and it’s best not to ask. My way of coping with an airport queue is to let my mind wander and see where it leads. Like, always buy your coffee in the same airport café where the hosties get theirs. Or will the pocketful of coins I put through the x-ray scanner hit the jackpot when they come out the other end? See, not everything is worth knowing. I was in Sydney airport waiting to board a plane for Melbourne, which had been named as a possible terrorist target. Alert and alarmed, people in airport queues do not talk about terrorism. Even a joke mention of the word "bomb" will get you detained. People talk about the weather instead. On the airport shuttle bus, the driver had offered reassurances about the dark clouds, guaranteeing it would not rain because Sydney was in a prolonged drought. A woman with a heavy accent told the driver the whole world’s weather was going creezy. She said it was zeero degrees and raining in La Paz at this very moment. At which point it began to rain in Sydney. "Yes," the driver said, "the weather’s very unpredictable everywhere now." So much for the Sydney drought. Inside the terminal I overheard a radio discussion on the difference between "Yeah but" and "Yeah and" people. The "Yeah buts" saw only problems and always raised objections to why a thing could not be done; the "Yeah ands" offered solutions to how a problem might be overcome. My general approach is: "Yeah but, and another thing..." This stuff plays on the minds of people once their identity has been reduced to a baggage barcode and left queuing for hours. They are also the sucker targets of airport newsagencies, which stack their shelves with self-improvement books like "Big ideas for small minded people" or "Word for the illiterate". The security screening means you spend more time waiting than you do flying. I know a woman who always carries an empty water bottle in her bag because, as she says, you never know when you might be stuck in a lift and need to relieve yourself. Or stuck with a full bladder in an airport queue but unwilling to lose your place. Occasionally things run smoothly in airports. On this occasion we boarded the plane without delay and no-one sat next to me. Even better, among the suits up in business class, a baby was screaing its lungs out. Bless it. Then, too good to be true, we went nowhere. Eventually the pilot came on the intercom and blamed the slack baggage handlers for delaying our departure. Have you noticed how the poor old baggage handlers have been copping the blame for whatever goes wrong in airports since the Schapelle Corby drug case? One smuggled bag of marijuana and they’re guilty of everything.
STANDING in an airport queue provides plenty of time for self-assessment, to become more aware of who you are … except many things are not worth knowing and it’s best not to ask. My way of coping with an airport queue is to let my mind wander and see where it leads. Like, always buy your coffee in the same airport café where the hosties get theirs. Or will the pocketful of coins I put through the x-ray scanner hit the jackpot when they come out the other end? See, not everything is worth knowing. I was in Sydney airport waiting to board a plane for Melbourne, which had been named as a possible terrorist target. Alert and alarmed, people in airport queues do not talk about terrorism. Even a joke mention of the word "bomb" will get you detained. People talk about the weather instead. On the airport shuttle bus, the driver had offered reassurances about the dark clouds, guaranteeing it would not rain because Sydney was in a prolonged drought. A woman with a heavy accent told the driver the whole world’s weather was going creezy. She said it was zeero degrees and raining in La Paz at this very moment. At which point it began to rain in Sydney. "Yes," the driver said, "the weather’s very unpredictable everywhere now." So much for the Sydney drought. Inside the terminal I overheard a radio discussion on the difference between "Yeah but" and "Yeah and" people. The "Yeah buts" saw only problems and always raised objections to why a thing could not be done; the "Yeah ands" offered solutions to how a problem might be overcome. My general approach is: "Yeah but, and another thing..." This stuff plays on the minds of people once their identity has been reduced to a baggage barcode and left queuing for hours. They are also the sucker targets of airport newsagencies, which stack their shelves with self-improvement books like "Big ideas for small minded people" or "Word for the illiterate". The security screening means you spend more time waiting than you do flying. I know a woman who always carries an empty water bottle in her bag because, as she says, you never know when you might be stuck in a lift and need to relieve yourself. Or stuck with a full bladder in an airport queue but unwilling to lose your place. Occasionally things run smoothly in airports. On this occasion we boarded the plane without delay and no-one sat next to me. Even better, among the suits up in business class, a baby was screaing its lungs out. Bless it. Then, too good to be true, we went nowhere. Eventually the pilot came on the intercom and blamed the slack baggage handlers for delaying our departure. Have you noticed how the poor old baggage handlers have been copping the blame for whatever goes wrong in airports since the Schapelle Corby drug case? One smuggled bag of marijuana and they’re guilty of everything.