May 30, 2002
The courageous

He looked cold, everyone looked cold. It wasn't so much as written across foreheads as an unwilling consciousness that seeped between bodies of people withdrawn within themselves.

He was selling on the corner, though it was plain he wanted to be elsewhere, doing something else. No one was buying any of his chestnuts despite his discouraged attempts at calling out his wares, and no one appeared to want to buy any. I didn't really want to buy any either.

When he fumbled for change for my fifty-dollar note in his bulging black bum-bag, I said I would come back, having originally wanted something from just up the street. He seemed a little surprised when I did, and a hint of a smile tugged the edge of his lips - his face was frozen, not just from the cold - but he kept the tiny paperbag warm whilst I fumbled through my change.

Parting smiles dispersed by the wind, swallowed by the movement and flurry of people all busy wanting to be elsewhere, as if there were not time to breathe.

Posted by sniffles at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2002
Leaning to one side

I have the horse song in my head, I said.
Horse song?
Billy was a horse, I said.
Ah.

The passing of days is something of a mystery. The computers on the floor are stripped down to their boards, baring their chips and connectors without so much as a blush. The boxes peer at me out of the corner of their cardboard eyes - I swear one or two of them purred, and one threw up an alarm clock - I tried not to look at them, telling them to shush, I checked my mental inventory and wished it could morph into reality. My mother was afraid to set foot in my bedroom and she doesn't think I know enough about people.

Time being buried in code, getting my Murakami fix whilst waiting for trains that would never arrive, listening to Josh Rouse whenever I remember to press the play button instead of just wearing my earphones - the rest of the time I hear Beethoven. I thought of her as she sat with her notebook on her lap and spoke to me about lacking inspiration. Once or twice, finger-advice wraggled at me from the textbook of unwritten shoulds and should-nots, seemingly with the tone of voice of one three times my age.

Strange too, that I could remember his feet with uncanny clarity.

Posted by sniffles at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2002
Shipwrecked

Misty mornings and eiderdown evenings, where leaves remain unreleased like suspended rain or freed like fallen crackled confetti, much too early for the bride of spring. The city is shipwrecked with lovers huddled in the cold and those alone perhaps wishing they were otherwise, perhaps content.

A woman peered through the glass doors of a closed shop, checking to see if anyone was still inside. Her blond hair tied back into a smart ponytail, her metal-rimmed glasses were no-nonsense, but her red scarf and long coat oddly rendered her gentle, even a little lost in an unexpected circumstance. In her right hand she clutched something I could not see, but in her left, she held onto the handle of a sizable box simply wrapped in brown paper, with the words 'Happy Birthday Catherine!' scrawled in green and three or four childish drawings of flowers.

Posted by sniffles at 08:26 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2002
Powerless

I woke up this morning, as usual, before my alarm clock was due to ring. I flicked on the little lamp that has been twisted round to fit inside my bookshelf, and I laid there for a while, being aware, though not quite awake enough. It was cold but my books didn't shiver, and neither did their shadows.

And then the power went.

So I showered and dressed by candlelight, having checked that the mains weren't off and that it was really a power failure, nearly losing a contact lens (and not realising it), gave up on the idea of war paint for the work day (make-up) and walked out into the freezing, breezy morning, hoping that I didn't look monstrous. Not enough light to check how I looked in the mirror ...

I passed a house just as a young man with dishevelled hair and a too-big grey jumper came outside, clearly recently awoken, and he glanced at me and managed a morning smile.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that I might have answers he was seeking. "Oh, excuse me. Do you have a power failure at your place too?"

Did I look that much a mess? "Yes, we do."

"Right, so it's not just us then."

A kind of a thank-you-good-bye gesture that was somehow expressed between half a smile and half a wave, and I staggered towards the train station, hoping that the trains were running, having not had breakfast seeing as I couldn't put the kettle on.

Posted by sniffles at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2002
The bystander

The sky is somewhere between steel grey and thunder cold blue, but the colours in the twilight are surprisingly vivid, leaves bravely sighing yellow and brown and even a gentle green, deep in their confidence and self-assurance that they are willing to lend to lost passing hearts.

The body resonates to a rhythm other than my own, it sings indignantly, ringing a thousand invisible bells, the faint electric ecstasy somewhere under my skin, wrapped around like a cloak of spider's web that I don't truly possess. The mind stands aside and watches with its hands in its pockets like a curious bystander, itself a cold steel grey, soaked by rain, umbrella or not.

I ought to be tired, I ought to be frail and fragile, perhaps I ought to be someone else, but instead I am alone with the world and it is alone with me.

Posted by sniffles at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2002
Pearls

La pluie tombe comme des petites perles ...

And I am afraid.

Why is it that we could spend a lifetime solving problems? It seems to be one of the barest bones of our conscious existence. Yet problems grow out of problems because we better ourselves, we better our efforts, the more we build the more possibilities arise, and always, there is something to conquer. We can do so joyously, we can do so hurriedly or under various stages of stress, we can be lighthearted or be challenged.

The tram crawled its way towards the center of the city. I thought of possibilities, watching the sparrows experiment with a packet of sugar then excitedly pecking at every speck. I tried to forget the day's problems.

The rain fell like little pearls on leaves already fallen. And I was afraid.

Posted by sniffles at 10:49 PM | Comments (1)

May 14, 2002
Landscape

Pour mes amis de Normandie:

"The house sits at the end of a potholed track overlooking a gentle valley sprinkled with cows so content and motionless they look as though they've been painted on the landscape."

-- "Almost French", Sarah Turnbull.

Posted by sniffles at 10:16 AM | Comments (3)

May 13, 2002
The colour of freedom

"In a short while acrobats are going to come, in tights spangled with an unknown color, the only color to date which absorbs both sunlight and moonlight at the same time. This color will be called freedom and the sky will break out all its blue and black oriflammes, for a completely favorable wind will have arisen for the first time and those who are there will realize that they have just set sail and that all preceding so-called voyages were only a trap."

-- From "A Short Prophetic Interlude", André Breton

I seem to be a little stuck for words. It doesn't mean that I'm not seeing, that I'm not thinking, but images have blended one into another and they slip through a sieve that apparently also serves as my brain, such that nothing hangs together.

In the meantime, the city is experiencing an outbreak of autumn leaves. They invade alleyways, corridors, carpets in offices, parking lots, streets and parkland; they are airborne and they transmit by soles of shoes.

Perhaps that's it; leaves. I can think of little else apart from leaves. Brown leaves, yellow leaves, not-quite-green leaves, red leaves, dead leaves, crushed leaves, whole soon-to-be-crushed leaves. You look at the trees now, and you see that the leaves which still remain are the ones at the end of branches. Yet these are the same places new leaves will grow in spring. Tell me, why is that?

Posted by sniffles at 04:32 PM | Comments (1)

May 10, 2002
Rustle

Leaves roll past down the middle of the road, competing with traffic - clattering, running away from the wind or with the wind, it is difficult to tell. The trees are singing, joyful, lightweight and generous, laying down layers of leaves to be trod upon by busy, careless human feet, while autumn gently rustles the days along.

I've been keeping track of WWW2002 though the sites of Robert Scoble, David Singer and Karl. On the thread of conferences, the Nielsen Norman Group is coming to Sydney, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it there.

Two nights in a row, I dreamed of walking in city streets, sometimes with another, sometimes not.

Posted by sniffles at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2002
Survivors

All of us are survivors,
And it is not important why we are spared
So long as we are aware that we have been
Passed over.

-- Oliver Bernard

The first morning in three that my normal train did not run late, and I managed to board the connecting train the Chinese lady usually takes. She was happy to see me, and she said that she should have walked with me two weeks ago when the train broke down because some minutes after I'd left, they were told the train was not going to be fixed anytime soon. She and her friend decided to go to work on foot but they did not really know the way and it took them a long time.

When the train flew across the bridge some metres above the streets, I looked down, and saw a fleeting flash of a white-haired man in a black suit on a tiny patch of grass scattering food to a gathering of squawking sea-gulls.

The taxi driver was from Wartag, Afghanistan. I wished I'd asked how to spell certain names. I asked him questions and he told me little pieces of history, minute morsels of his life. I had a little too much celebratory beer for my liking, but it seemed I made sense and apparently my directions were unambiguous. When we arrived around the corner across the street from my little box-home and he said, "I wish you a good life", there was little else for me to do but to wish him the same.

Posted by sniffles at 11:55 PM | Comments (1)

May 07, 2002
Freedom is elusive

It had been a wandering kind of day - I seemed to have travelled further in some ways, yet completely lagging behind in others. My thoughts took independent paths of their own, a jumble between last night's episode (ta, Dan) of "The Secret Life of Us", speeches by Breton, morality, freedom and faint images of nurses in pale pink uniforms. And what are you supposed to think when a right-wing candidate was assassinated in the Netherlands?

"The Internet Is For Everyone" (ta, Karl), but it wasn't because of that that I ended up finding a somewhat old list of references on reading Chinese on non-Windows platforms, or The Unihan Database search engine which provided a bit of geek entertainment.

I knew even before he came into sight, when I heard his music which was very deliberately floating up the street and mingling with the city's restlessness, that he had not had a good day. We talked for a while, and somewhere in between the day's complaints and foggy dreams of days ahead, a bright yellow tram rolled by and its advertising made us laugh. I said I would come back and say hello over the next day or two, because we might not see each other again for a very long time.

Posted by sniffles at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2002
Finding our feet

Fresh Antipasto: Slipping.

I dragged Cos with me to see the Indonesian production "Ada Apa Dengan Cinta?" where the experience of being in the audience was at least as interesting as watching the movie itself. For a start, the screening happened an hour later than the time printed on the ticket. And then there were people who were not polite enough to turn off their mobile phones.

The movie itself was pleasant and unassuming, though for me, the naivety and innocence of the youths depicted was a little alarming - not because of the aforementioned naivety and innocence - but because of how utterly real and true-to-life this aspect is.

Added to that, a good percentage of young girls in the audience giggled loudly and a good percentage of young men made encouraging noises if the characters in the movie were about to kiss, or if they were involved in any kind of intimate conversation with the possibility of kissing.

Not surprisingly I guess, I enjoyed the poetry most. The music was excellent and worthwhile. I don't know about the chances of this film being shown elsewhere around the world apart from South East Asia (in Australia it has only been shown in Melbourne and Sydney), but keep an eye out for it anyhow. It's a sweet story of youths finding their feet and their own place amongst love and friendship, just as Indonesian cinema is maturing and ripening, and opening up to the rest of the world.

Posted by sniffles at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)