Life out of balance

After a cold and rainy few days in Brisbane the weather has returned to normal. I'm looking out the window as the warm afternoon sun glints through the trees, and following an exhausting session at the gym (a couple more plates on the squat bar today) I am suddenly in a writing mood.

It seems as though our culturally determined end/beginning date of our orbit around the sun has arrived once more. It always makes me reminisce about New Years eves gone by. The last one was in London - not long after the shortest day of a cold, dark winter and some light snow - and was one of the best days/night during that 11 month stint in the UK.

This year I am back in Brisbane of course. No firm plans yet about what I will do. Heather is working the night shift (it had to be Christmas or New Years) and a lot of people are out of town. There are a couple of little gatherings going on and mum and dad are also coming up for the night to see the fireworks at Southbank. I'm not too fussed about what I do - really I just want to reflect on the past two years (something I have been doing a lot of lately) and quietly welcome in the New Year while thinking about what everyone I've met overseas might be up to in their various parts of the world.

Amongst the daydreams I've been having of South America there have also been some little questions I've been pondering, such as the issue of 'extremism'. The most common definition of 'extreme' refers to the excessively large divergence of behaviour or belief from an 'average' or 'norm'. Which can only lead to the most important question - what is normal?

For non-statisticians (and people who can't remember their Year 10 maths) there are generally three ways for determining a middle ground. Mean, Median and Mode.

MEAN:

The Mean is your classical 'average' - add everything up and divide by the number of people/things - only possible if you can create a Belief Index (100 = the utmost extreme in one direction of belief and 0 = the utmost extreme in the other direction) and then using a large enough sample of mankind and a clever enough survey to accurately calculate a person's Belief Index score.

MEDIAN

The Median is the middle number - more specifically - if you could put everyone in a line starting with the most extreme person at one end (Osama bin Laden maybe, closely followed by George W) and the other most extreme person at the other end - such as Jesus or Karl Marx - you would find the person who is exactly in the middle of the line and they would be the median.

MODE:

The Mode is simply the most common. So again using our Belief Index, whichever score occurred the most frequently would be considered the mode belief.

As you can see it would be utterly impossible to calculate what is 'normal' accurately using statistical methods - and that's not even mentioning the complexity of a persons 'beliefs' and the ways in which conservatives can sit in left wing camps sometimes and religious extremists can promote equality and socialist ideals. But if you keep those methods in the back of your head and do some generalisations about what we know of the world and its demographics, some estimates of what is 'normal' would be very suprising to a lot of us wealthy white folk.

It could be that 'normal' is a Mandarin speaking Sunni Muslim who works in a manufacturing job to support his elderly parents.

Just a minute. I've totally lost the thread of my discussion. Getting back to my Belief Index. And applying it specifically to attitudes towards capitalism, consumerism, tax, and government intervention more generally. I think that we would find that what we believe currently to be normal would actually fall at the lower (or upper) end of any index. The consumer economy in its full glory (sarcasm) is only a recent phenomenon. If people abhor extremism then why do they allow advertising to infiltrate every corner of our lives and constantly live to the extent of their wealth instead of giving back to the world (not state/country) that provided them with that opportunity for wealth. How much more extreme could our consumer lifestyles become?

Know your scales before talking of balance.

Una fin de semana muy buena

It is one of those almost-hot mid-December days, any physical exertion would result in a sweaty afternoon. But to potter about inside a wide open Queenslander, the gentle breeze wafting through the front doors, is a delight.

Heather is hard at work at the Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital and I, after a lovely sleep-in on our new mattress, have been doing some leisurely tidying, cleaning and organising of the house - making it more our home - consequently, I must be a homemaker. A pleasant role for the short term, but I am already getting restless in mind and body - a good gym session will solve half the problem, but a rewarding, satisfying and not-too-stressful job would solve the other half. I am on the case, but often need to remind myself that the urgency for employment is not the same as it was in London and I can bide my time while hunting for the right one for me.

I flew back to Brisbane yesterday afternoon following a pleasant weekend catching up with Lucas and Farah - and meeting Lucas's friends and family and taking a trip with him down memory lane to his adolescence in Wollongong.

After a hectic and frantic end to our time in London together, and indeed to our travel experiences to that point, it was great to catch up again and ponder the difficulties of the world and how they should be solved as well as learning more about the latest countries we had visited in our travels.

The big news from the weekend, however, was the engagement of Lucas and Farah. I want to wish them the best and say how I excited I am for them and all the amazing opportunities and adventures they have before them to tackle together.

As for the minutiae of the goings-on in my cerebrum - I have just finished the oft advertised 'Freakonomics' - basically an economist doing some statistical analysis on data sets requiring some ingenuity to uncover, and some lateral thinking to approach and interpret. His most controversial topic being how the 1973 Roe v Wade decision in the US resulting in the legalisation of abortion in most US states was the key underlying factor causing the reversal of growing crime rates in the 80's and early 90's. Backed up by further case studies of similar effects in various European countries it appears almost unrefutable. The book doesn't make any moral judgments about rights or wrongs and doesn't advocate any ideal - purely using the data and some unbiased common sense to draw conclusions.

Ah, the Spanish program on SBS radio is beginning. Time to move on.

The unsettlingness of settling

This evening is the second time since I have been home that I have been gripped by a sense of panic, unease and a strange feeling of claustrophobia - or is it more that feeling in a dream when the brakes of your car won't work as you approach stationary vehicles.

The first time was after I had been in Brisbane for a few days before Heather flew back up from Sydney. I think being back in the house I lived in for a year and a half at University without any connection to anyone from my recent past made me feel like I had regressed six years. Some people might enjoy revisiting their youth, but I feel like my life gets better every day and I wouldn't turn the clock back if I was given the chance.

The second attack of itchy feet (this evening) has been after a long day of moving things into the house (like last time) and expending a large amount of brain power on how the furniture in the rooms should be arranged.

On both occasions I have suddenly had an intense desire to once again own only what I have in my backpack and get on a plane to distant country that doesn't speak English (preferably Spanish). Life is so much simpler while traveling - the only things that matter are where the next meal will come from and where you'll sleep that night. It becomes more complicated when you have to start earning an income - but even in London when you can keep your purchases of bulky items to a bare minimum and make do with what a rental house has to offer things remain pretty simple. I suddenly feel like I am the owner of a vast array of furniture, clothes, memorabilia from my past and other non-essential junk. It makes me feel cluttered and over-burdened with material possessions. No wonder people buy home and contents insurance - they get so paranoid about all this 'stuff' that they've invested their souls into considering, purchasing, carting home and setting up in exactly the right spot to match the rest of their 'decor'.

So as I was sitting in our newly rearranged lounge I wondered why on earth it matters that everything 'fits' or 'looks right' (bearing in mind that those questions had been at the forefront of my mind all afternoon). This is also on top of an ugly visit to IKEA - people strolling about considering how best to waste their money on matching suites for their homes, I felt physically repulsed as I navigated us through this behemoth warehouse of SHITE to clog up peoples homes an relieve them of their money that they worked to hard for so that they could get that 'Windsor Lounge Suite' they've had their eye on for months.

Surely a house, if it is indeed the nest which baby birds are to raised in, should be expression of the people who own it - a collection (mismatching most likely) of items from the past and present that tells a story about who these people are. Bear in mind I think I am being EXTREMELY lenient by even suggesting that people should waste natural resources on expressing themselves through interior decoration - there are plenty of other environmentally friendly ways of expressing yourselves.

But we want to be comfortable? Firstly we have an obsession with comfort, and extreme comfort at that - our leisure time becomes condensed so we need to intensify the R&R so that we feel like our bodies are floating through heaven before we consider ourselves properly comfortable. Squatting on your hind legs is an extremely comfortable position if you are taught to sit like that from a young age - or cross legged on a carpet. But no, we need cushions (matching ones), just the right shape and firmness couch and the TV at the right angle so we don't need to use another calorie of our energy while we 'relax'.

Okay I've gone on a tangent there.

I don't want to get caught up in the game of desire for 'nicer' things just because I can afford to. This is a bit of a pointless post because I don't think there is answer or a way to stop people from spending all their incomes on pursuing 'comfort' - it will always happen and is what drives our individualistic capitalist economies. I just want to be free from the cycle of consume, work, consume.

On another note - as I knew I would, I regret every second of my time (much of London excepted) traveling that I didn't stare wide-eyed at everything around me and soak in every ounce of atmosphere, language, music, custom and food. I envy those who are still in a 'foreign' land. I say 'foreign' like that, because really there is no such thing as a 'foreign' land. We are all people, we all eat, sleep and go to the toilet - in different ways and Australia has it's own ways just like any other country.

Have also put some photos up from home and the cricket