November 27, 2002
Sleeplessness

I'm interested in hearing personal stories about sleeplessness and insomnia. So if you've been having trouble getting shut-eye, I'd like to know what you think caused it for you, how badly you have suffered, what do/did you do or think when you can't sleep, or anything else that's related that you'd like to share, really. Drop me a line if you like, or leave a comment. Mucho appreciato. :)

Posted by sniffles at 12:34 AM | Comments (13)

November 26, 2002
Bright eyes

Sitting still in a make-up chair for four hours can be surprisingly exhausting. I was falling asleep over dinner ...

On my way to being a model for a make-up student today, I encountered an unusual scene in the subway. A woman on the opposite platform was walking her dog right up to the edge, then dragging the beast around the edge such that one of his hind legs dangled in the empty air for about half a minute, and then she would walk him back to safety.

I watched her go through the entire routine again, and as I was witnessing it for a third time, a woman appearing beside me exclaimed, "Oh my god!" and clapped her hand dramatically over her mouth. "It's nothing to be worried about," I said, and proceeded to explain that the woman on the other platform was simply training a guide dog. He wasn't learning very quickly - he was supposed to obstruct the path of the trainer before she gets too close to the edge, but he really wasn't getting the idea.

Presently, the benches around me filled up with people, and about ten of us watched the trainer and her dog repeat the routine, over and over, mesmerised. Again, I had to explain to someone else that it was nothing to worry about, feeling somewhat awkward at having found myself in an unwilling position of relative superiority because I was able to decipher what was going on.

I guess something positive came out of working very close to the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind for two years. Whilst I have been aware for a while now that the common understanding of issues relating to disabilities is very poor - this transcends to Web accessibility - today's curious little episode left me somewhat disheartened.

Posted by sniffles at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2002
Music and the moon

Montreal, Canada.

Setting foot outside the bus terminal, the air was crisp and cold. It seemed easier to breathe; it was peak hour in the city but it was as if the snow a few days ago had laid a blanket of calm - there were many people about but they seemed to be content. I fumbled for a dime for a man who said he needed just that to have enough money for a bus ticket home. It was good to be back.

I spent the whole of last Thursday at the MFA and didn't manage to see everything, probably because I was in the musical instruments collection for at least an hour. It wasn't a big room, but I guess I am revealing my true self and my origins, when I admit to reading every single description card and looking at each instrument in detail. The collection included prototypes for instruments as we know them today. I longed to make a sound on the glass flute or play a Bach on the clavichord; it seemed an injustice to have such precious instruments locked away behind glass cases, never again to be played.

These couple days, I have been keeping a little more quiet, trying to be a little more focused, having many books I want to read and many words I would like to write. Honestly though, perhaps I am merely recuperating from the hectic schedule of the week just past ...

This made me laugh tonight: Conspiracy theorists, you have a problem. In an effort to silence claims that the Apollo moon landings were faked, European scientists are to use the world's newest and largest telescope to see whether the spacecraft are still on the lunar surface.

Ho-hum.

Posted by sniffles at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2002
South of the border

Boston, MA.

Somewhere off Milk Street (I had lost my bearings by that stage), I came across a second-hand bookstore that was tucked below ground level. I would have certainly missed it if it weren't for the shelves which looked like they might topple under the weight and age of their charges, and a sign hesitantly saying "All books on shelves - 25 cents".

Much to my surprise, I found "Forty-Seven" by Australian author Frank Moorehouse near the door, a release that seemed to have been his debut in the United States. On the train home, sitting next to a boy with a Pentax who couldn't have been more than fifteen, I read the first page:

The American poet's visit.   After lunch over coffee and stregas at Sandro's the poets showed their pens. Two of the poets had Lamys, another a pen from the New York Museum of Modern Art which looked like a scalpel. A fifth said he thought he'd 'get a Lamy'.

They handled each other's pens, writing their favourite line from Yeats or Eliot or whoever. 'Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world', one wrote. He had not seen poets at this before.

He then made a reluctant presentation of a book of Australian stories to the visiting American poet Philip Levine, for whom the lunch had been organised. He said the book contained the story The American Poet's Visit and that he had been induced to present it by his friends as a 'joke Australien'.

'Did Rexroth ever read the story?' Levine asked, after being told that it was about the American poet Kenneth Rexroth.

This wasn't known.

When we here, he gestured at the table, were all younger, Australians wrote with a perspective which came from feeling that we lived outside the 'real world'. For us, Europe and the US were the world. We lived somewhere else.

And over the page:

Australians wrote with the greatest freedom there is - writing without fear of being read.

I pondered this, and missed my stop.

The coach ride to Boston on Sunday was uneventful, if rather shaky for the last two hours. It had snowed the previous night, and the landscape stretched white all the way until about half an hour out of Boston. I chose to come almost on the spur of the moment, and have spent the last couple of evenings mingling with the loveliest of people. I'd gotten lost within the The Museum of Fine Arts and walked the city - drinking in the mood in the streets, feeling a tiny bit homesick for the first time in months, moved by the sight of modern, minimalist skyscrapers nestled amongst older, more ornate architectures which remind me much of Melbourne. The screech of streetcars as their metal wheels scrape against metal tracks - I kept calling them trams and confusing those who didn't understand my origins.

People in Boston don't seem to smile a lot, even on a sunny day.

Posted by sniffles at 05:39 PM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2002
Safety pin

Lately, I've spent time in the company of others. One day last week, I was a model for a theatre make-up student who gave me a black eye, a bullet hole in my head, and a safety pin through the top my hand. Being so sociable has tired me out somewhat.

It has been a long time since I had written in Antipasto, a site which began more or less like an online diary and evolved into a writing journal of sorts. Today, I cooked up a fresh entry: Between.

Posted by sniffles at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 08, 2002
Slush and spam

Sometimes, my own actions or inactions are a mystery to me, and occasionally, I find out quite a while later the reasons behind why I might have done something or not. Such is the case with spam filters - I have never filtered out spam from my inbox. Not yet. Only just the other day I realised the basis for this - I have found that the spam flowing though our private inboxes daily provides a kind of reflection of our society and its sentiments.

Think of the number of spam emails one gets everyday - advertising sex, money-making opportunities, web services (well, I get these anyhow), or services to disclose email addresses to you so that you can send others spam to tell them about your ideas, your services and what you can sell. Marketing, money, and sex. Well, mostly money and sex.

I received one the other day with the subject: "It's Called Freedom". Have a read:

Do you struggle to pay the bills and buy groceries for the family at the end of each month? When asked to go out to lunch or dinner, do you make excuses with your friends because you're short on cash? Do you find yourself counting down the days until your next paycheck? If you've answered yes to any of these questions , you suffer from "too much month at the end of the money"!

How would it be to never have to worry about cash flow? Picture this, when you see something you want you just buy it because you're not worried how it will cut into your budget. If you want new clothes, a gift for someone special, or even a new car, you know exactly what it takes to make it a reality. If you like the sound of this, I've got a home-based business opportunity to share with you. Interested?

So it takes someone with a good marketing sensibility to pen the above spam, but yet for him or her to have written it, it must contain a certain amount of truth. It would be unfair of me to make a generalisation of our society just based on the junk mail we get, but I can't help wondering if it's all good news.

Posted by sniffles at 12:08 PM | Comments (6)

November 04, 2002
White noise

Through the early morning window, I peered down at the dust of snow on the asphalt and on the edges of the cars parked below. It has snowed, and I was a little dismayed, thinking that I had missed the snow of the day. However, not much later, snow tumbled down as if someone had torn open pillows of feathers, and so it has continued, much too my childish joy, all day and most of the night.

In the morning, a neighbour smiled at me as I leaned precariously over the balcony with my beloved camera. In the evening, on the phone to a friend on the other side of the world, I put out my hand and tried to catch the largest snowflakes I could reach.

Do you eat snow? I do, though more so when I don't intend to. It seems that my equatorian eyelashes are useless in this kind of climate.

I was a few minutes late meeting the artist, unaccustomed to being slowed down by weather. He kissed both my snow-flushed cheeks, then we made our way down the street for a coffee.

I have noticed a problem with cafes in general. You can have the most elegantly or stylishly decorated cafe, bar or restaurant, where even the decor in the washrooms is something to gawk at and admire, yet so few places seem to know how to manage the aspect of sound. It's not just about the right music - too often, the music is too bold, too invasive and played much too loudly. It is also about balancing the acoustics, ensuring that the furnishings of the place add to the atmosphere by subtracting unattractive noise.

A lovely place to have tea in Montreal is Salon de thé Camellia Sinensis, on Rue Emery near Saint-Denis. They played soothing spiritual new-age music when I was there, but the division of space and arrangement of furniture meant individual conversations travelled a little too far, and the calming effect of the music was lost.

Once we went to a very popular place on Rue Crescent (I forget the name) where the echoes were atrocious. Bare walls, hard floors and exposed ceilings meant sound bounced everywhere from everywhere else. The voices of patrons presented a constant murmur that made it difficult to hold a conversation; worse still was the clang of forks and knives and the amplified crash of crockery.

I can name many more places, but essentially, the problem is the same.

Today, this cafe played some pleasant jazz. A little too loud for my preference, but my hearing is more sensitive than most, perhaps to make up for my inferior eyesight and sense of smell. Outside the snow continued to fall, and in my mind I heard the sound of silence.

Down the whitened streets, past the whitened cars, whitened trees still bearing leaves, whitened people, we discussed society and art, and the act of creating. Those who delighted in the first snows exchanged smiles, though many were scowling at the cold.

In a little alley which no feet had trodden through since the morning, the snow had piled high and thick. But someone had been there before me and had thought exactly the same - he, or maybe she, had walked into the mouth of the alley, just a few feet in then out again, leaving a semi circular trail of deep shoeprints. Unabashed, I followed suit and walked a semi-circle around the existing prints, then continued on my way home.

Posted by sniffles at 11:50 PM | Comments (4)