i too, shall pass.

apparently, the mteach at usyd is ungraded. that is to say, you never get a mark out of 100 - you just get a pass/fail. not, of course, that a 'pass' is like an arts 'pass'. its not 51% = too much effort. the workload hasnt quite begun yet but they are already making nervous with the threat of multiple reflection statements and the dreaded self-directed learning. oh my.

so i thought, why not re-start the blog to document me going through this whole process of 2 years of becoming something completely other to what i was before. i mean, i'm sposed to continue writing everyday, and although i find it easier to write creatively with pencil and paper, i am also sposed to work on my "ICT" skills. that is information and communication technologies, newbs. so yes, i boldly make a vow to the silent emptiness of the electronic superhighway to write on this thing at least once a week - to blab on about whatever meta-entertainment news i stumble upon in life (also newly known as google reader), and to reflect (ohgoditsstarted) on this process.

its got me thinking, i dont know why i feel uncomfortable being creative while typing. you see, when i type in this tiny little window they provide you on blogger, i never stop. i mean, i go backwards, but i try not to overly edit. i find that it is better for me, on looking back, to see the unadulterated expulsions of my brain as it tried to sift through the various things that happened to me. my mind works a lot faster than my articulatory brain does, let alone my non-secretarial-standard fingers on this keyboard. i've heard it said that some people find writing cathartic. occasionally that happens to me. eg, after ive watched a particularly moving piece on the telly. but most of the time, it doesn't leave me. thoughts linger. concepts fade only to re-materialise again. connections between modularities in my life begin to make themselves. i don't really have to put a lot of effort into this kind of free-association kind of thought. once or twice ive come up with a gem that i deign to put on a piece of post-it, there for anyone traipsing through my room to find. more often i find it impossible to sleep at night for the cacophony of crap circling around in my headspace.

our lecturers told us to collect news items about the education revolution that is apparently taking place in the country. i can feel the excitement. you just have to open the paper, or listen to mothers in suits on the train. something is coming. its a bit trippy, that the entire system that i took so for granted while coming through myself as a high-schooler is being switched around. kids learn about the asia-pacific region before year 7. they learn the articles and functions of grammar (which amuses me because the only time i learnt more than that a verb was a doing-word was during latin classes). the things that i think i fear most about being a teacher are probably ICT and the cult of personality. i hate the idea of telling every kid that theyre great, but that was how my generation was raised in class. i hope i can unlearn what i have absorbed.

i finally decided to take the plunge and let rss into my life. ive signed up to about 7 feeds. some are just fun things that ive been reading once a week for the last 2 years or so, you know, mostly comics. but ive decided to try this thing called 'growing up' and patch myself into government media releases, reuters and arts sites. its scary, knowing that if i don't check my mail for a day things will begin to clog up. i need to increase my efficiency, just like the robot that the usyd site told me i was when i tried to sign up.

ive had to beg off some of my volunteering commitments (i told myself this was to give me more time to focus on learning), but then i turned right around and signed up for some other stuff. i had a lot of fun last year, when i experimented with 'just say yes', and so i want to keep it (not completely indiscriminately). seeing the world shake and the days get shorter, people dying All The Time, and reruns of the day after tomorrow, makes me realise how terrifyingly fragile everything is. not to take things for granted. fills me with a moderate urge to make something with my life that is not playing with fake money on the sharemarket (or as i call it, 'imaginary land'), or pushing papers around while sitting on ergonomic chairs. i want to celebrate rube goldberg toys while realising that it is going to mars and teaching manners that will change the world - not finding out if reese and ryan are back together. we need to celebrate what makes us human without indulging in self-glorification. it doesnt yet make sense. but one day i think it will.

i... live by the river

i watch things, on tv, that sometimes i don't really understand. either i come in halfway, or they use the conventions of some foreign place.
it is the same with music. sometimes i know exactly what they are saying. toni collette and the finish - i get it. paul kelly has always made sense to me. even silly things like old american love ballads are completely understandable. i don't think it is because they have fewer layers than something like augie march or mumford and sons. its just that sometimes, because of the person you are, the things you think about, and those experiences that you have had (and shared with others), some people make sense. and others don't.

take ashes to ashes. everyone gets the action scenes, they get that it is sad that skelton betrayed everything for a wedding ring, on a surface level they can handle the fact that alex is in a coma and might be dreaming the 1980's. it might even be okay, in a chuang-tzu way, that she is unsure whether she is a mother dreaming she is an out-of-place DI, or a bolly dreaming of the future and a girl named molly.
but you need to know more than that to experience the chills when supermac whispered 'rose' with his dying breath. you need to know that another rose had the last name tyler. and that the gene genie never believed the other man who had that same last name. as an aside, it makes even more sense when you find out that sam was given the name tyler by the billie-piper fan of a daughter of a writer on the show. you need to know that across the way, various punters had taken photos of a blonde-haired john simm in a grey hoodie accompanied by those four fateful knocks. it is necessary to realise that the hunt is going to have to deal with a comatose alex just when he had begun to believe her. and you need to remember that the first season was called 'life on mars'. and that the tenth doctor is nearly done.

or that doomed-to-one-season sitcom about superheroes on abc2. that the fishman that made a move on she-force was the clown that ended up with a pregnant clare keelan on a show that was graced-with-one-season about a wedding on a perfect day.

its all very meta- and intertextual, but i think there is more enjoyment to be had in the connections. it is the reason why things like imdb and six-degrees of kevin bacon exist. it fuels the crossovers of jpop stars into the world of film. it is the reason why traditional artists decide to paint a filmic palette instead of staying behind a static easel. why official tv websites now offer lists of 'music played in this episode'. these hyperlinked shows are the reason for the success of a show like glee, and the booksales of one richard castle, who in another (related) life was really the space cowboy he pretends to be for halloween.

there is a research tool called crowdsourcing. humans become computers again and pick out dust trails in interstellar jelly and craters on the red planet. im certain not too many of the sci-fi writers of the 1950's realised how capitalistic inequalities would re-create human slavery in a high-tech world. when we go to mars (of course it will be mars), the people living there will experience a kind of utopia based on the slavery of countless human masses sifting through data. we don't need the oud - we have the poor. i begin to lose hope in the dream of mechanical AI - on some poetic level i think it is right that we are doomed to be alone in this universe. alone to torture each other and end each other. alone so that we cannot blame anything else for the way that we trash our universe. i doubt we will ever make it out of the solar system. hawkeye said that the average existence of a single species on earth is 2 million years. we're in the tens of thousands i believe. do you think we can make it out of this mess we're in?