Virtually Home

When I finally experienced real winter, the upper-Midwestern winter that I dreaded, it made me depressed. Every aspect of my Minnesota life was built around avoiding and accommodating the awful cold. Imagine my joy at leaving Minnesota at the end of August, before the cold could set in. We spent September in Nebraska and Oklahoma, enjoying the end of the summer. We flew to Australia and landed in the springtime. People said summer would be brutal here, but I'm not sure why. We have one wall-mounted air conditioner in our house. Most days, we don't run it. Instead, we open the windows. On hot days, we go to the beach. The wind kicks up every afternoon around 2 or 3 p.m., like clockwork, and cools the place down. It's never very humid, which means the temperature drops off precipitously around sunset. I will grant that the sun can be brutal, in the middle of the day, but in general the climate here has been lovely so far. Today is March 1, which is accounted the first d...

When we moved, I expected the distance to be the hardest thing. Not being able to get home easily or often. Losing touch with friends. I have moved often enough, and experienced enough big life changes, to know that people gradually grow apart when they don't see each other regularly. Even with effort to arrange visits, deep relationships turn into periodic shallow updates. There are no new memories, only a growing number of Skype appointments or text exchanges in which one of you asks the other what they've been up to, until someone finally calls it quits. It's like every long-distance relationship is a little universe expanding until it's stretched so thin it's meaningless. But it turns out the time is the bigger problem. Western Australia is 13 hours away from central daylight time, and 14 hours away from central standard time (on account of WA doesn't practice daylight savings time). This is annoying for business. You lose a day with every email exchange, ...

I was having a casual conversation with my friend Callum at the bar the other night. I said something about the fall -- I can't even remember what it was. He paused before responding, and asked if "fall" meant "autumn". It turns out Australians don't use the word "fall" to refer to the autumn because they don't have native deciduous trees. There is no such thing as the fall, here. Somehow, I had never considered that. I was suddenly struck by how profoundly the environment influences culture. I remember having the occasional disorienting linguistic observation when I lived in France, but I didn't expect that to happen here, where I thought I already spoke the language. It makes me wonder what the world would be like, if the British hadn't come to conquer all of it.

Sometimes a moment in my life gets stuck in an album, like a mosquito in amber. From then on, hearing that piece of music reminds me strongly of being in another place at another time. Just after I moved to Bordeaux, Monsters of Folk released their eponymous record and I walked around the streets listening to it on my iPod repeatedly, relentlessly. Our washing machine was broken from the moment we moved in, and the repair process took an agonizingly long time. The sound of that album is the dryer spinning in the laundromat down the road from my house. It's the automated voice announcing stops on the tram on the way to the Université Bordeaux III for my linguistics classes. It's the long walk home from the guitar store where I bought the Cort electric-acoustic guitar I played that year (and which I recently gave away to a friend, to downsize my belongings before moving to Australia). This musical fossilization doesn't always happen and I can't always tell in real tim...

Saturday night at the State War Memorial January 26 is Australia Day. The occasion is celebrated in mid-summer, typically with drinking and barbecuing among friends, followed by fireworks. If this reminds you of the 4th of July, you're not wrong to draw the comparison. In recent years, some Australians have advocated for moving or abolishing Australia Day because the data was chosen to commemorate the arrival of a British fleet, and celebrating the colonial history of this nation, which is marred by numerous massacres and injustices against its indigenous people, strikes some as uncomfortable and inappropriate. Think of the vibe on Australia Day, then, as about two-thirds 4th of July, one-third Columbus Day. Australia Day is the only day of the year on which new Australians become citizens. We happen to know someone who became a citizen on this Australia Day, which I thought was pretty cool. This year, the holiday fell on a Saturday, with an official observance the follow...

This is just a stub of a post to say: I went to see The Decemberists with a recently-opened venue in Saint Paul. Gaelynn Lea opened with her violin playing, loop pedal, and intriguing vocals. Chris Funk came out to play a song with her. I thought her set was captivating. The Decemberists continue to impress me with their technical precision on stage, even though they tend to play a predictable set and use the same gimmicks over and over. Their new whale featured in their Mariner's Revenge encore was beautiful, and I had a blast at the show. I have now seen them a bunch of times, in Texas, Washington, Maryland, Minnesota, and England. Even the tours supporting albums I'm not as crazy about have been really fun.

I've been living in Australia for a few months now, and the main thing that experience has taught me is that my accent is dumb. American vowels are flat and lazy and nasal. I pronounce too many R's on average. It's really quite unseemly. The culture here feels like a weird blend of UK and US culture, partly because goods and media are often imported from both places. I've enjoyed learning some of the features of Australian English and hearing a wide variety of Australian accents. There are tons of immigrants from the UK and elsewhere in my department, so I'm encountering a lot of those accents too. Some Aussie words and phrases I've been interested or bemused by so far: "How are you going?" is used instead of "How is it going?" or "How are you doing?" Tasty cheese = cheddar Barbie = grill, but grills tend to be fireless electric cooktops in this wildfire-prone region Bushfire = wildfire Lollies = candy "Hey" is...