Virtually Home

Arriving in Australia was a surreal experience. If you have never moved to a foreign country to which you have never been, I'm not sure I can relate the experience. It's like diving off a 10-meter board into a pool of unknown temperature, in which there may be saltwater crocodiles. We touched down in Sydney after a 17-hour red-eye from Houston. Getting through biocontrol and customs took us our entire layover. I had just watched six movies and was exhausted. Ever since getting a blood clot on a plane, I can't sleep in a chair. I just watched a bunch of not-so-memorable movies and stood up obsessively to stretch my calf muscles. And all that was between crying jags, since I had received news of a close friend's death immediately before getting on a plane. We ran through the airport and got on another plane, across the Australian continent. I had an aisle seat, so no view out the window, no access to movies, and insufficient bandwidth to read, by that point. It was a lo...

I think I've mentioned this wall before. It's possible I've even posted a crappy iPhone photo (much like this one!) of it before. At least once a week, there is a spray painted message on this wall. Usually it's an anti-fascist sentiment, like "Fascists go home," or something of that nature. This one is a wish for "parasites" to leave universities. The messages often about some aspect of university life. You probably can't read the tag at the bottom right corner, but it's the name of some kind of student forum that often puts graffiti on this wall and on others. And every time this happens there is someone out there the next day scrubbing the wall, or repainting it if that's what it takes. I really wonder why they don't cover this particular wall with the kind of paint that turns walls into chalkboards, or install a giant white board and just leave a bunch of markers. It occurs with ridiculous frequency, and apparently without con...

Lately I've been on a Mountain Goats, Bob Dylan, Neil Young kick. You know, guitars and male vocalists with hard-to-like voices (can't forget Conor, but I wouldn't call that a kick anymore). Today, I'm working on learning The Needle and the Damage Done on guitar. I'm making an effort to play more often, since I have all this time on my hands with which to learn while I'm, you know, not going to school. I'm wrestling with myself over whether I should try to go to the university today. I have to turn in some photocopies of a paper I got back about two weeks ago, but every time I've tried the professor hasn't been in his office, since they don't necessarily keep office hours in this country. Some of them do, if they want -- one hour a week, for all of their undergrad and graduate students combined -- and they don't announce it in class, so you're just forced to show up at their door, if you can even find it, as that's not announced in ...