armyofone

I'm actually amazed I've used LiveJournal this long, let alone kept updating it, but at long last I think it's time to retire it and move on to newer pastures. Those few on my already withered friends list still posting here, I'll still be following along, but for now my updates will be going here instead:

http://badvoodoo404.wordpress.com/

After promising myself to go hiking in the Blue Mountains again for weeks, and every weekend punking out and staying home, I finally made it up again, thanks in part to some sparklingly-clear weather. The idea of exploring as many hiking trails as possible has embedded itself in my head, and with the help of what turned out to be a very incomplete trail map of the Blue Mountains National Park, I ticked off the summit of Mt Banks and a hike beyond to Banks Wall looming over Grose Valley.

Every hike I take in the Blue Mountains amazes me at how accessible so much of the area can be, but at the same time looks so foreboding and inaccessible. As an example, according to a plaque at the summit of what is now an easy family hike, Mt Banks was the site of one of the first parties attempting to cross the Blue Mountains giving up and going home. Given that all you see in almost every direction from that summit is sheer cliffs, I can't say I blame them.

A further bonus of this trip was giving me a pretty firm grasp of the layout of the valleys nearest to the city, and I've started formulating a plan for a 1-2 night backpacking trip. However given how fried my legs were after only 3 hours of hiking, I need to do some more conditioning first.

On a side note, my camera obviously once again has something on the inside of the lens. Goddamn it.

For most, the internet is a source of inspiration, a fountain of ideas and creative collaboration. But for me, it's just the opposite, at least with technical projects; I'm paralyzed into creative inaction by the sheer volume of what's already at my fingertips. The learning curve has gotten drastically steeper in the last 10 years not because the technology is harder, but because there's an army of hobbyists driving at almost every problem imaginable with the knowledge of the world at their instant disposal. On the occasion I grasp a kernel of an idea, I'm generally stalled by the likelihood that my idea will be obsolete by the time I learn how to execute it.

I feel like I'm getting dumber simply because all my needs are already met.

Apart from going to see X-Men: First Class, I really didn't accomplish much over the weekend, which I found myself mentally thrashing myself over. But as Kat pointed out, I've been doing this not infrequently lately. More and more I find myself finishing whole weeks with no sense of accomplishment and a grudge at my own ineffectiveness. Even though I went out to dinner and drinks with a group of people Friday night and went to the movie with _leareth, I chastized myself for my social isolation. I ran, I read, I gamed, but all I noticed was the two days that had slipped past.

So what does this? Is it social ineptitude, unable to fill my life with people like my roommate does not just naturally but out of necessity? Is it my laziness or lack of imagination keeping me from finding worthwhile pursuits or stagnating on my current ones?

Then it occured to me: I have no challenges. I have goals, but those are simply something I would like to explore rather than something rising before me to be overcome. I think my finger injury, picked up less than two months after I started climbing again and grounding me from exercise almost before I'd started, has again dropped me into a well of physical mediocrity. I can't put my body to the test, losing myself in effort and, when it finally quits, relax in exhausted satisfaction. I'm much more of a physical hobbiest than a mental one, and having to fall back on mental hobbies when anything I can think of has already been conquored is simply not enough.

I've come one step closer to my perfect scramble:

3 eggs
~1/4 cup cream
~1/4 cup grated mozzarella cheese
Dried oregano
1 tomato
1/2 purple onion
1 handful salad greens
Cholula hot sauce

Still need to work out the best timing for cooking it, but this time I diced the onion and tomato and threw it in the pan on medium-high heat, then a few minutes later added the mixed eggs, cream, mozzarella cheese, and oregano. As it was nearly done cooking, I added the salad greens to wilt them, then dished up the whole thing and added Cholula sauce.

Some ham and mushrooms, and I think I've nailed it. And yes, I made that for dinner.

It's actually rather fitting that my biggest road trip to date in Australia began snarled in rush hour traffic for two hours. One of the main reasons for the trip was simply to escape the city for a while, and as a parting shot the city was reminding me of exactly why. I crept behind a sea of red tail lights, desperately switching through all the happiest music I could find on my iPod to keep from going insane. Once I broke free of the grasp of Sydney, the rest was as easy as breathing. Back in the early 2000s, I discovered that I not only enjoyed road trips, but I was something of a driving machine once free of the unpredictable and agressively competitive jolt of urban driving. Four hours of driving ticks by like I'm relaxing in a lounger. Even my lower back, which normally grows angrily uncomfortable after a couple hours of sitting, seems perfectly at ease logging hours in the driver's seat.

Given the awkwardly extended start and the fact that I was picking up Kat to travel with me from Canberra, I can't even register the Sydney to Canberra leg as part of the trip, the daylight long gone and darkness hiding already well-familiar freeway. The next morning, after packing up some larger items from Kat's parents' place to shuttle down to her apartment, we took off south along the Hume Highway, hitting my first stretch of previously unseen road of the journey. This one thing alone makes road trips worthwhile for me, since I have this unsupressable urge to see what's over the next rise. Kat plugged in her newly-made music mixes and we cruised south, stopping only to visit the most Australian roadside attraction I'd ever seen, the "Dog on the Tucker Box" monument, which is in fact a bronze statue of a dog sitting on a wooden box labeled "Tucker" (or "food" for the unfamiliar). From there we stopped for the night in Beechworth, a small town in the foothills of the Victorian mountains that has built its reputation around weekend getaways, a fantastic bakery, and the fact that the infamous Australian anti-hero Ned Kelly was a resident to the jail there more than a few times.

The following morning we polished off the remaining stretch into Melbourne, where I successfully avoided running into any of the streetcars until I could find a place to safely park the Roo Disco for the peace of mind of pretty much everyone. My disinterest in driving around the city is not helped by the fact that in my giant reinforced Land Rover, I feel like a tank driver in Tiananmen Square with protestors crowding around me threatening to defiantly jump in my way, only with much less idealistic conviction and much more legal liability.

Since I was celebrating my birthday on this trip, Kat had surprised me with tickets to the Cirque Du Soleil show in Melbourne. Coupling the facts that I had never been to a circus as a kid but had been involved in gymnastics, the show stacked up to be fantastically entertaining, from the clown stealing my popcorn as they warmed up the crowd to the seemingly impossible acrobatics. I actually found myself more enthralled than the kids around us. It was the perfect pause before hitting the road again the next day.

Not to say that the driving over the next few days was much to tackle; our destination in Apollo Bay, midway along the Great Ocean Road, was only a few hours from Melbourne, allowing us to keep the leisurely pace of late breakfasts and even later starts. From our base at the Sandpiper in Apollo Bay, we spent the next few days winding along the coastal highway, visiting the Twelve Apostles (one of the iconic Australian natural wonders I had sworn to one day see for myself), eating enormous dinners, polishing off a giant bottle of wine, and generally enjoying a nice relaxed weekend getaway on the remote coast with some dazzlingly clear weather. On one particular detour we even spotted an enormous group of wild koalas blearily lying about the crooks of tree branches, moving as little and as reluctantly as a shared household trying desperately to come to grips with their collective hangover after a massive party. With much the same reluctance we eventually had to pack up and head back along the coast to Melbourne, knowing the working world was not far away.

Two somewhat fundamental things about me shaped my afternoon yesterday:

1) In order for me to live in a city, I must escape it a a regular basis. The longer I go between escapes, the more it will effect my mood. However I am also less likely to attempt these escapes if it means I have to subject myself to more of the city than usual (specifically traffic).

2) I have a deep-seated aversion to planning anything more involved than dinner. This leads me to do a lot of things on my own, since most people are rarely available to decide their day on a whim, plus I'm more comfortable making snap decisions by myself since I don't have to worry about group consensus.

I had originally planned to go somewhere undetermined in the Blue Mountains on Sunday, but after being called into the office for a minor breakdown at 8AM and thus burning up my morning, I decided the Royal National Park to the south of the city, about an hour's drive away, was more appropriate. It was also an area I had never visited, which always puts something at the top of my list by default.

So after a leisurely BLT at my usual weekend cafe, I braved the freeways and highways of Sydney that seem as though they were designed by an engineer who either hated people or had never traveled more than 100 meters at a time, and plunged into the park in search of a hiking trail. What I found was a perfect undaunting stretch of the Coast Trail, which apparently runs for quite a ways along the edge of the park. The portion I followed was a short 4km stretch out to one of the rarest sights in the Sydney area: a deserted beach. This however was not the most remarkable part of the hike. No, the remarkable part is that people do not die on a regular basis on this trail. When you come to the first viewpoint from the top of the sandstone cliffs, you are easily tempted to walk out over the very flat and sturdy-looking rock to peer over the edge. What you don't know until you walk further along the cliff is that this spot has been so weathered from below that the last couple meters of rock is no thicker than an abridged collection of Shakespeare and is in fact sagging. The sight is wonderously horrifying.

Fate and perhaps some unconscious distrust of rock made from sand however kept me off of that particular deathtrap and I survived to return home through more insane city traffic, comfortably tired from my walk. I promptly celebrated my victory over this escape from the jaws of death by planting myself on the couch to watch Christian Bale play a very convincing crackhead in The Fighter.

Another weekend spent gladly puttering around Melbourne, this time including a first trip outside the city limits to visit the Healsville nature park and manhandle some of the less hazardous Australian wildlife. Unfortunately it was not Kat's finest weekend, but I think we managed to at least take her mind off of some of the uglier parts of the week for a while.

I'm sure the fact that Melbourne is not unlike Portland in culture, weather, and even to some degree setting, that in the past year's worth of weekends spent making the trip down, I now almost feel more at home there than Sydney despite being solely a guest. Funny to think that as absurd as I find hipsters, their presence is actually something of a comfort because I still find them less preposterous than the sugar-frosted clones of Sydney, if only slightly. As I said to someone else over the weekend, I prefer Melbourne's artistic pretention to Sydney's "look, we've got Master Chef" pretention.

I would actually probably be rather annoyed with the whole thing if not for two things: one, I've grown familiar enough with Melbourne at this point to get past the honeymoon phase and find the things that can annoy me about it as well, and two, I've started to finally make some actual efforts to fill up my time in Sydney with all the things the city has to offer beyond just its location. Sadly the social side is still severely sparse, especially since all my recent attempts to extend my social circle have resulted in mixers with college students who just make me feel old if still culturally relevant.

Ultimately, I'm not sorry I'm living in Sydney, especially given all the horror stories I keep hearing from the US of the job climate, but I am glad I have an excuse to make regular trips to Melbourne. It just happens to be an excellent excuse.

At least half of the past weekend has been spent unconscious. The rest hasn't wandered far from it, as sometime around noon on Friday the weight of a cold settled firmly on me and only just started to let up Sunday afternoon. My standard routine when I get a cold is to essentially shut down, drink immense amounts of tea, and play various movies and books on tape in the background as I wander in and out of wakefulness under the covers of my bed. I simply entomb myself with my misery until it decides it wants to go play elsewhere, venturing on the occasional expedition to the kitchen to replenish my tea and perhaps some miso soup and an english muffin. Time ceases to have much meaning, and I'd almost enjoy this sort of carefree, womb-like cocooning if I didn't feel so goddamn awful.

And just like that, it's Monday again.