performance evaluation

For awhile now I've been feeling some quiet discomfort toward facebook. I say 'quiet discomfort' for want of a better expression; although it's been nagging away at me for some time I haven't managed to organise my thoughts into a coherent statement that sums up how I feel. I've been slowly cutting back my fb activity over the past few years - partly as a form of self censorship to avoid those disapproving comments from family members, and partly because I find most of what others post is mundane or cliche and I like to think I'm not so self centred as to think one hundred percent of my activities will be interesting to anyone else.

Then today I caught myself doing something I do quite often, scrolling down my own profile page and imagining how it looks to the casual observer - be that the last friend request I accepted or the guy who was always too cool for me in high school - and I realised that our facebook pages are used to evaluate us as people. I was evaluating myself as I imagine others do, in the same way that I evaluate my facebook friends. And therein lies my discomfort.

I'm dissatisfied with the person facebook makes me out to be. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with what's on there - a gig I went to, some links to blogs and opinion pieces, an information tab that was last updated circa 2008. It's just that, all in all, it doesn't add up to much; certainly it doesn't add up to the way I'd like people to see me, despite my efforts to make it do so. Every post on there has been considered and screened; they are monitored more heavily even than the things I say and do in real life. Facebook is an extension of the performance we partake in every day. It's a refined and cultivated expression of ourselves, by which I mean that it is an expression we actively refine and cultivate, not that it can necessarily be described as 'refined' or 'cultivated' in any way.

I think maybe this discomfort lies at the bottom of the initial backlash against facebook's introduction of the timeline layout. The timeline idea takes this notion that facebook sums us up as individuals and creates an historical archive of online activity, and it's pretty grim to see ourselves laid bare that way. Luckily for facebook, or perhaps it was by design, I think the fun of updating the cover picture has successfully suppressed most people's initial suspicion that facebook was trying to condense and reproduce our lives. Not that I can speak from experience. I'm probably the last person on facebook not to upgrade, which is less of a virtual protest than an expression of laziness. But that's a statement in itself, the same way that suspending your facebook account was a statement when it was in vogue a year or so ago. I never did that either, mainly because I felt it was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are reasons I like facebook, and there are things I hate about it. But I still use it.

This isn't a particularly strong note to end on, but they can't all be winners. It's been a long time since I posted anything on this blog, or on my other one for that matter, so I think it's better to chuck some words out there, regardless of how poignant they may or may not be, than to lay in wait for the perfect combination of inspiration and eloquence to strike. I'm probably going to link this on my facebook page. Oh, the irony.

Climate Change Part 2: It's personal

I have this memory from when I was a kid of asking my mother why people used to smoke in the olden days when smoking is bad for you. Her answer was simple. "They didn't understand that smoking was bad for them. That's why people used to smoke in the olden days". I accepted it, at the time. But years later it occured to me; people did understand. As early as the 1960s everyone knew that smoking wasn't doing them any favours, health wise. But they were addicted.

Just ask these guys.

Anyway, I saw these ads from the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 which made me wonder. Will I, one day, have to explain to my kids why we didn't do something about climate change when we had the chance? Will I have to explain that people drove cars everywhere and threw out food? That we scorned politicians who tried to introduce legislation to tax carbon and that we demanded cheap electricity over renewable energy?

 And most importanly, will I be able to look them in the eye and say 'we didn't understand'? Because I'm just not sure that'll be a good enough excuse. We do understand. And if we don't, we really should.

The information is out there. It has been for a long time.

But just like smokers, we're addicted to our decadent lifestyles. We don't want to quit, and we don't want to believe that we have to. And there are some pretty powerful corporations who have a strong financial interest in keeping us hooked.

The world is going to change. It's inevitable. It always is.
The real question is, are we going to take a measure of control in the direction things go, or will we just be swept along in the consequences?

Climate Change Part 1: It's political

I'm doing a subject on environmental politics at the moment. It's fairly chilling. The inevitability of the massive changes to our current way of life that are going to occur over the next 50 years of human history ... well, it's nothing short of daunting. I have no intention of making a case for the truth of man made climate change here - it's been done so many times in so many different ways I honestly don't know what I could say to change the  mind of someone set on denial. But the biggest thing I've learnt from the course is that, like everything in the world, the environment is not above politics.

One of the reasons there are so many climate sceptics in Australia is because its severity (and indeed, its very existence) is debated daily at the political level. 

Most of the nations that are in a position (both economically and developmentally) to best tackle climate change have leaders who are democratically elected, and election cycles of 4 years or less. This creates an incentive toward short term policy, which is woefully inadequate when it comes to the environment.

The reason European countries like the UK and Germany have far more extensive climate change policies than Australia is that in the 1980s when climate change first became an issue they had conservative governments, lead by politicians with a scientific background.* This meant that they understood the science and took it seriously, and when a change to a non-conservative government occurred the environmental policies already in place were improved upon, rather than scaled back.**

The 'ClimateGate' scandal highlighted that even the world's most respected climate scientists have felt the pull of politics, going so far as to manipulate their scientific findings to make them more politically persuasive and/or palatable.

There are more examples, but for the sake of brevity I'll leave it there. The point is, though, that the political debates surrounding climate change debate can explain a lot about it.

Believe it or not, Europeans aren't all climate change believing, sustainability achieving, bike riders. (Until I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo I thought Sweden was full of philanthropists who lived in sustainable apartments, ate organic food, and loved paying taxes. Turns out they have corporate tycoons just like anywhere.)




*Margaret Thatcher studied Chemistry at Oxford before going into politics; West Germany (and later united Germany) was led by conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with environmental expert Klaus Töpfer as Minister for the Environment, Conservation, and Nuclear Safety.
**I unashamedly stole the idea for this dot point from Peter Christoff, lecturer at Uni Melb and actual Climate Policy expert.

If life gives you salt lamps ...

 I bought a salt lamp at one of those Ishka warehouse sales a while back. I've always wanted one - they make such pretty light! - and this one plugs into my computer, which is handy. Plus it was half price.

ooh, salty!

  Sadly, though when I turned it on for the first time I discovered that instead of a plain coloured light bulb which would shine naturally through the salt and make my room into a new age wonderland, the lamp was electric blue. I tried pulling it apart to see if there was a coloured filter I could remove, but no luck.


 

This photo actually does it too much justice -

in real life the colour is far more offensively bright.

Initially I was disappointed, but I've decided to embrace the weirdness of it. I mean, it's a salt lamp designed to correct the imbalance of ions in the air caused by evil technology. But it's the colour of a disco light. New age hippy meets dancing queen.

Anyway, this whole experience has led me to a point where I'm trying to be more positive about things. Rather than despairing when life gives me the proverbial electric blue salt lamp, I intend to dance to techno versions of Bob Dylan songs while wearing a sequined kaftan.

Proverbial sequined kaftan, that is.

songs for the ages

Little girl, do you know who I mean?
Pretty soon she'll be seventeen

From the moment when I first laid eyes on you
All alone, on the edge of seventeen

She's nearly twenty and so very old

She's twenty years of snow
Twenty years of strangers looking into each other's eyes

The world's got me dizzy again
You'd think after twenty two years I'd be used to the spin

three more poems

Degrees of Certainty

if you’d studied nursing, you’d be at work by now

not attending a lecture on an abstract noun

studying with a degree of uncertainty

certainly

the work would be hard, the pay low

(patients require much patience, according to medical shows)

but at least you’d have the Degree

caring is practically a universal language

unlike the philosophical abstractions which

you can never claim to understand with certainty

certainly

you’d have to work the night shift

but your husband could tell the children you’re a witch

and they’d laugh and say “she’s not!” while secretly believing it, to a degree

but it does no good to imagine when

decisions made upon a whim

commit you to a Degree of Uncertainty

About a ring

I bought a ring to replace the one I lost

now my finger feels complete

if only I could say the same                                

Northern Territory Intervention

Because of the intervention

the town was filled with them.

They were camping in the Todd

taking advantage of its dry sandy bed

(we would later see their campfires

as we drove back from a local restaurant).

But during the day they simply

leaned against trees    shops    churches

sat on grass    steps    pavement.

It was meant to be a holiday.

Two weeks away.

Learning about the red centre.

Hands on. Adventurous.

But first – tired from the

flight – we found some

local markets and wandered around.

Because of the intervention

it was hard to look at them.

I wanted to say something,

let them know I was on their side.

“I am ideologically opposed.”

But I was awed by the

insufficiency of my words –

my own ignorance – my political mindset,

so divorced from the reality of their lives.

Because of the intervention

I forced myself to look at them.

I made eye contact with an old man.

He was leaning against a tree,

watching the busy market.

I made eye contact, but he didn’t.

He looked through me

but in his eyes I saw a landscape,

and I moved on hurriedly

unsettled by his stillness

so incongruous with my own

fast paced world.

It didn’t last, but for a second

I understood.

And I mourned for the

souls that were left behind

when we conquered this land.

three poems

Lawyer
my father
wearing a suit of
grease

sitting

cross legged
in the bonnet
of his car

patiently polishing
the space where
the engine should be

Dementia

my grandfather
in his chair

resting his eyes

surrounded by family

even though

there's no one there

Reprise

my sister

singing in the

bathroom

greeting the morning

with music full of

words; joy

ful of sorrow