armyofone

- Normally when I've gone back to Hawaii for the holidays, there was always the anticipation of, "Sweet, I get to go to the beach, snorkel, and wear shorts instead of all this cold weather!" Now that I live somewhere with virtually identical weather and water during the holidays, it's become more just, "Sweet, now I can go to the beach all week!"

- Last night at my friend Chiara's birthday / farewell party, I discovered my new favorite bar in Sydney. Up until now the selection and service had been fairly unremarkable, but on bellying up to the bar, not only was I greeted by the sight of Appleton Estate 12yr rum on the shelf, and come to find out that the house well rum is in fact also Appleton, but the bartender had a fantastic attention to detail with all the mannerisms of an OCD Johnny Depp. Just a pity the bar is in one of the most impossible to reach districts in the city from my house...

- From Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden" in discussing behavioral brain function:

In one study of the behavior of the squirrel monkey, Caspar, the dominant animal in the colony and by far the most active displayer, was never seen to copulate, although he accounted for two-thirds of the genital display in the colony--most of it was directed toward other adult males. The fact that Caspar was highly motivated to establish dominance but insignificantly motivated toward sex suggest that while these two functions may involve identical organ systems, they are quite separate.

Now if only we could put this knowledge to use to gradually cure ourselves of politicians.

So, I've been badly neglecting my LJ in favor of trying to spur my writing for Failure To Land, as well as, I hate to say, the minimal, Twitter-like updates in Facebook. The Facebook part especially is a bad habit that I've been struggling with, but it's become my primary social link with all those friends overseas that I miss bantering with so much, so it gives me a way to still mentally spar with them. But you are not forgotten LJ! I've even given you new icons, look! Icons!

I know, I'm a bad blog friend.

For the weeks since my return from Europe, surfing has become my new weekend goal, or at least it was until my physical therapist put the kibosh on it because I kept screwing up my shoulder some more from some of the longer sessions. But really, it's been completely worth it, especially this last Sunday at Freshwater beach ,where the sets were 4-6 feet and, maybe not glassy, but they were damn good. Having only just gotten to the point where getting to my feet is a very real possibility, dark blue still fills me with more dread than excitement, but I still felt fantastic sitting in the lineup, trying to find my own sweet spot, waiting for the wave that said "ride me". And then it would be there on the horizon, growing steeper and bigger in perfect timing to reach me just as it was getting ready to collapse on itself, lifting my tail and blindly throwing me forward. There was no finesse, no style, just running from a torrent of disaster chasing behind me as the glints of sunlight off the water streaked into tracers at my feet, but it really didn't matter. It felt fantastic. And every time it was over, I wanted to do it again.

For the next two weeks I'm on a surfing hiatus to let my shoulder recover a bit, but I leave for Hawaii for Christmas in just over a week, where my board is sitting in my parents' garage waiting for me, and reports of winter swells in the islands keep showing up in my feeds. Shoulder recovery will probably have to wait.

While on my run this evening, thinking back on past Christmases, it suddenly occurred to me that around 7PM on this day two years ago, I was touching down in Australia as a new resident. It was my first move in over eight years, and only my third time outside the US. I landed as the sun was setting, and took a cab to my home for the first three weeks in the middle of the city, toting the sum total of my belongings for the next three months along with me. I was disoriented and wondering just what the hell I'd gotten myself into.

Feels like an awful lot of time and events have passed since then.

Well awesome. Because IT couldn't get their shit together, I'm not going to Buenos Aires until next month, and even that's a bit tentative until people can figure out just how long it will take to fix everything. And because of that, Tokyo is now uncertain as well. Goddamn it people, what the hell exactly are you getting paid for?

At least I'm still headed to Hawaii for Christmas. Nobody can fuck that up but me, and that's not about to happen.

The writing muse has been extremely evasive with me lately, although work, surfing, and GTA IV have not helped get its attention either. I keep meaning to write more about my trip to Europe, which is soon to be stacked under my trip to Buenos Aires as well. But I have at least finished a new item I've been mulling over for Failure To Land.

So it's a start, anyway.

Every so often, an image will linger long beyond the usual time taken to digest it. It's one of the things I love about photography. This one has been haunting me lately.



Thelma & Reuben (My Parents Were Awesome)

Before I left for Europe, I had noticed I was having some shoulder issues, but nothing serious. Since I've gotten back, the shoulder's gotten a bit worse, so I finally made an appointment with the physiotherapist and had it looked at this morning.

Thankfully my fears of cartilage damage or frozen shoulder were unsubstantiated; I simply have been neglecting my mid-back exercises, and the muscles and ligaments around the rotator cuff have been suffering the effects. Essentially I just have tendonitis in one of the connectors in my shoulder, and scapular winging due to poor muscle mass.

So, in a nutshell, crisis averted, and back to the gym with me.

I so badly want to be anywhere but here today. Don't want to have to read more bullshit corporatespeak about how I can do more for the company, don't want to come into work early just to get it over with, don't want to stare at the same walls all day. It all just feels like wasted days, accellerated erosion of my time sheared off by the ponderous, behemoth glaciers of mundanity.

Frustration is the lingering aftertaste of freedom.

I occurred to me on a number of occasions during my trip that, while my cold weather gear is very functional and compact, the bright orange fleece vest and well-worn fleece pullover are not exactly "urban" travel wear. So, I may have to find a way to get this coat, or something like it, hopefully without the 35% additional shipping cost.

Unless, of course, someone's looking for a Christmas gift for me. Y'know. Just puttin that out there.

I blame my visit to the original National Geographic building in London for this.

One month by backpack, thirty minutes by train, and twenty three hours by plane later, I landed back in Sydney yesterday at nine thirty in the morning. Still in the surreal haze of sleep deprivation and jetlag, I was whisked off by Jess and Sam to breakfast in the midst of the Sydney skies upturning a freshwater ocean over the city. Dropped off back at my place, I mechanically unpacked, started a load of laundry, and powered up the laptop to catch up on the world's updates since Kuala Lumpur and start dumping my photos off my camera's SD card.

And just like that, the trip became a memory.

I don't even know where to start with writing this all out, and I may pick just some highlights, since a month of new things every day is a lot to commit to text. And it's not stopping for a while either; I've got trips to Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and hopefully Whistler in the next three months, as well as wherever Christmas break will take me.

A week seems a long time to be home right now.

Four days later, I'm wrapping up a remarkable tour of Munich and Oktoberfest (despite intending to leave yesterday). Munich is a remarkable city, and I really feel the need to come back when it's not crawling with partygoers, althought a city filled with people in traditional Bavarian outfits without coming off as a tourist trap is extremely charming.

Despite another cloudless day today, I'm going to spend my morning doing much-needed laundry before heading off to catch the train to Paris.

I feel decadent just writing that.

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Just about done with my England leg of the trip. Two and a half exhaustively non-stop days in London, a day trip to my family's namesake town of Bedingfield, and now I'm taking a calm day and a half in the seaside town of Brighton. At least, it was supposed to be calm, but I accidentally booked a room above one of the busiest bars on the seafront. So, I guess instead I'll practice for Oktoberfest.

Speaking of which, tomorrow I leave for Munich.

This whole thing is STILL hard to process as real.

Updating from my phone is a pain in the ass for more than facebook-style statuses, so I'll probably save it for when I get home in a month. But, after nearly locking myself out of the house just before I had to leave for the airport and the airline computers crashing world-wide when I did get there, I made it to London yesterday and am psyched for what's to come. The time difference is going to be a hassle though, since I'm nearly on the exact opposite side of the world. For example, it's now 6:30 am and I've already been awake for over two hours and been forced to kill time and my hunger at McD's. Sky's getting light though, time to go watch the sun come up on the Thames.

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Upcoming Bootie mashup parties: Oct 3rd in Paris, Oct 17th in Munich.

I need to make it to at least ONE of these.

In keeping with my watch fetish, some of the watches in this article, like this one:



cause me to make this face:

Starting from first light this morning, the city has been surreal today. Overnight, a massive dust storm that's been making its way from the middle of Australia blew over Sydney, and when the sun rose, it was like waking up on Mars. Bear in mind, this is the distance equivalent of a dust storm in New Mexico making its way to San Francisco. With the first tinges of light, the air itself was a bright red, lit with an apocolyptic alpenglow. Many people on the city's edge feared an inferno had snuck into their backyard while they slept, but the air was cool, and the only smell was the metallic aftertaste of dust in the back of your throat. In my disorientation from being half-asleep, I thought my eyes were somehow having trouble, and had to keep looking at the light on my computer monitor to be sure I hadn't lost my ability to see the color blue.

By now, the angry orange glow has paled to a brown, but the air is still choked, and everything is dusted with a coating of the same color. Looking down the street, the surrounding landscape is hazy, like the city is caught in a bone-dry rainstorm. The smell of dust is constant, and walking outside stings the eyes and makes you blink much more than normal.

I kind of wish it would last another day. I really want to see another morning like we had today.

Meantime, a massive collection of photos from all over the city has been gathering on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1239213@N21/

I just may have to burn straight from London to Munich to catch the end of Oktoberfest, then backtrack to Paris.

I mean, really.

I've had a lump developing in my palm for a while now, and at first I thought it was just an inflammation of a tendon from climbing, but it's not only lasted a while, but it's gotten bigger and a bit sore. So to make sure I wasn't setting myself up for possible problems during my trip, I decided to have it looked at, expecting at worst to have to get some sort of treatment when I came back.

Well, as it turns out, I have a rather odd condition called Dupuytren's Contracture (pronounced "doop-a-tron", which is awesome), the cause of which is only broadly guessed at. On the upside, even the worst-case scenario looks worse than it is; the doc said it's never been shown to be caused by climbing, and it shouldn't prevent me from doing much of anything I want to, including climbing. The worst of it is just that I'll have a sore spot on my palm and that my finger may get bent over more and more to the point that I don't actually have to do anything to crimp a hold, and even then I can get it fixed surgically.

So, nothing huge, but a little disconcerting. Getting older sucks.

EDIT: This article from the British Journal of Sports Medicine shows indications of climbing accelerating occurences of Dupuytren's, but not causing it outright. Discussions in the climbing community are about as vague and varied with experiences, so really, the whole thing is just a big, fairly innocuous question mark. Which is really what I expect with most orthopedic medicine these days.

EDIT 2: As it turns out, this may also explain the slight shoulder soreness I've been feeling over roughly the same period of time when my arm is raised over my head in a certain position. Guess I'll have the shoulder checked out when I get back.

One week from now, I will be in in the air on my way to London. And it still doesn't feel quite real. I still need to book a room for my first night there so I at least know where I'm staying the first night in my jetlagged stupor. One thing I've finally decided I want to try to do in London: find the Abbey Road crosswalk. I'm also not quite sure how I'm going to get from Ipswitch to Bedingfield, since it's not exactly a big "destination town". But, things will go as they will.

To be perfectly honest, this post is mostly an excuse to use the new icon I made today.

EDIT: Think I've got a plan for getting to Bedingfield and touring the countryside a little. Now I feel I've at least somewhat earned the icon for the day.