saying my goodbyes

Sorry I've been offline for so long (all my millions of cyber-fans out there, yeah right), in my zen process of denuding myself of wordly belongings my computer was one of the first things to go, and so I've been offline for a few weeks. What with finishing work on Friday as well, I'm limited to access at this dodgy internet cafe around the corner from my house. It's low-tech, but actually much easier to deal with than your international cyber-cafe chains, because you can get to the Internet Tools no problem and clear the history yourself.

Today almost all of my belongings are gone. Just a table I eBay'ed that will get picked up tomorrow, and a few things left to set out on the street.

And today I finally called to start saying goodbye to various service people - the phone, the health insurance, the gas company, the power company. The most poignant one was the Commonwealth Bank. I clearly remember setting up the account when I very first arrived, just a fresh-faced kid who'd just turned 29, just a freshly minted PhD all apple-cheeked and shiny-eyed with optimism about her new land and her new job. I wanted a Commonwealth Bank account because it was THE Australian bank, and I was very excited about being Australian. Also there was an office conveniently on campus. I believe I went along with one of the members of department to set up the account - they came along because they were personal friends with the bank manager and could make it all run smoothly. My account always had "St Lucia" as the branch location on it, from thenceforth.

While I was at the branch opening the account, my colleague (I forget if it was Andres or Hinck) told me about the time when my other colleague, another former American, had himself just arrived and opened an account. This other Yank philosopher had arrived in I think the late 1960's or early 1970's (rumor had it he HAD to leave the US because of helping the underground railroad of young men who wanted to dodge the draft going to Canada, but this was never confirmed). He hadn't got paid yet and so had no money at all and was finding things a bit tough. One of the other philosophers found out, I'm pretty sure it was Hinck, and they marched down to the bank and said, "Barry!" (or whatever the bank manager's name was), "This is my colleague G.M. He needs to open an account, and to get a bit of money. Can you help him out?" "No worries, Ian," replied the bank manager. "Come right this way, G." Those were simpler times, when Queensland was a much smaller place, and everyone knew everyone and looked out for each other.

Fast forward to today. People move around so frequently and for such insubstantial reason that when I rolled up to the Commonwealth Bank after 15 years as a customer, and said, "I'm moving overseas and need to close my account," I was walked to a teller, he asked me about four automated questions of a computerised screen, then paid out the balance of my account to me in cash ($34.05), and then said, "Just wait a moment while I cut up your card." Snip! "Anything else I can do for you today, Ms Watson?" Well, no, what else could there be? "Okay, have a nice day." Not even a nice trip, which the AGL, Vodafone and HCF folks all said. Just, snip!, and that's it, done, relationship with bank cut.

I must say I like it better this way, but it did make me stop and think.

At the risk of serious plagiarism, here is my Astrobarry for this week:

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The speed of constant busy motion and a stream of
triple-booked social-calendar days might fool your surface perceptions, but I'm
not biting, Gemini. There's more going on inside you than a ticker-tape of names
of people you still haven't emailed back and locations to pop into for this
errand or that face-time. If instead of increasing your tempos, so frantic to
squeeze one or two more tiny productions into a too-crammed day-planner, you
actually slowed down and planned on being less productive… what would happen? I
wonder if perhaps, on some underlying level, you're a bit frightened of that
prospect. What if I suggested you're attempting to skim past some gripping
ultra-sensitivities, traces left from emotional events of the recent or
less-recent past that have never been given their full respect, and thus are
hanging around under the surface, hoping you'll take a break at some point and
embrace their need for acknowledgment? In case you're telling yourself, 'I
should be over that by now,' let me reassure you: It's perfectly okay if you're
not. However, should you refuse to own your tenderness, you're only increasing
the possibility of projecting it outward—and finding plenty of other people
whose annoying moods, short tempers or cloying sentimentalities drive you stark
raving mad, in addition to ultimately slowing you down anyway. Only, in that
case, you're still not doing anything with your own emotional business, other
than postponing it another couple hours to fit in a cocktail with your old boss
or a trip to the gift shop for one more unnecessary token of distraction. Work
with your moods, rather than ignoring or resisting them.

Watch out, loved ones. I'm about to be annoying, short-tempered and cloyingly sentimental. Don't say you weren't warned.

things I won't miss

There was something edgy about Sydney today. It was hazy again, not bad temperature but you couldn't see the sky for the low haze of clouds.

Six, count them, six different people asked me for change. They always nominate an amount. "Excuse me, ma'am, do you have one dollar?" "Do you have two dollars?" Rather than shopping around for the best bargain, I just have a blanket policy that I never give money to anyone on the street. Especially not the registered charities who accost you at the train stations, but actually I didn't see any of them today.

The people who ask you for change are always just sitting there, lurking, stationary on the footpath or on a step, waiting, making eye contact with everyone who passes. So now as I walk up to anyone stationary, I get a tense feeling of demand and persecution. Several of the stationary folks didn't ask me anything, but I still felt a sense of pent-up, directionless, somewhat sinister masculine energy coiled up around the city.

I saw two fights. One youth on a bicycle said something to set off the security guard at the Coles across the road, and the guard had him in an arm lock for a little while and was shouting. The kid on the bike must have continued to say whatever it was, because the guard took off running after him still shouting, even after he rode off on his bike.

And the other was in the park by Central, a family with two little kids was standing at the footpath looking and smiling and something - from the look on their faces it looked it it was jugglers or a circus or something. I looked where there were looking and there was a small crowd and two guys having a fight. Sort of a fight club fight. I thought it was kind of appalling that the family was standing and gawking like it was suitable entertainment for kids. Maybe the fight club fight was something more exhibitionistic like capoiera class or something. But still.

Edgy, edgy, edgy. I'm looking forward to the big, flat, friendly midwest, especially because I will be hermetically sealed up in my car everywhere I go.

sober bullet points

• I watched all my Sopranos and I worked my way to the end of West Wing so I picked up a whole bunch of Northern Exposures, inspired by my sister. It's weird watching them because I remember them so vividly well, in fact a few I skipped because I could play them all in detail in my head. Two tonight had relevant themes.
• 1) One on tribes, where Joel muses about what it is to be a member of a tribe, anyway. I was with my tribe last night. Philosophers. You can depend on certain things about them, wherever you are in the world - good talkers, funny, witty, atheists usually, irreverant, hardly any conversational boundaries. They appreciate that I speak my mind and hold my ground and raise my voice and, when required, slam my hands on tables to make a point. They like those things about me. I like those things about them. But I am moving back to my other tribe. Family. Totally different set of connections. They don't understand me. But they are blood, and think of things like offering to help me suss out the best way to drive to work, on Saturday, before I have to do it for real on Monday morning. Bless her. I also have passports for both Australian and American tribes. And I'm a member of the Newcastle Knights Football Club. And etc.
• 2) One on exes, where Elaine comes to visit Joel. The very enticing scene when they fall into bed together but then decide the reason it was so great is that they're not in love any more. I couldn't possibly do what she did - remark on his sheets, stay in his house, reminisce. Even ten seconds in his entryway on Tuesday night was freaky enough - I saw the red stepped chest of drawers, I had forgotten all about it, it used to be mine, we bought it together (impulse buy the same day we bought the washing machine, almost the day we got back from our first trip to Europe), I had forgotten all about it, I had been under the belief that my house was complete with its furniture, but there it was.
• I'm so tired that I'm worried I'm going to get pneumonia. My work is very stressy, we're making lots of mistakes actually, and I can't possibly get everything done, much less take lots of time during the day to make phone calls to cancel my electricity and gas and that kind of thing. And the atmosphere is weird as - everyone has moved so far apart from each other that there's no sense of team any more, and I worry that my boss is going to get really lonely for the cool people he's hired - he didn't think this through very well at all. And I thought today, you know, even if this gig hadn't come through, I might be looking to move anyway, because I can't live with these levels of stress this continuously.
• I was already overcommitted. And now as a hobby I'm trying to organise an international move. But I'm definitely not bored!
• Another thing on television - RPA Hospital Where Are They Now special. One woman had surgery for mesothelioma. It's a cancer you get from asbestos, and she didn't even know where she had been exposed to asbestos. She was a lovely, vibrant, young Irish woman, with a handsome husband and two little girls. They tried chemo and she improved and then thought that was all she needed, but no. Surgery was necessary. It was horrendous. The first RPA show where I actually winced and looked away from the screen. But they caught up with her two years on and she was doing well, and she was talking about living with the illness, because I guess it always comes back. She talked about what a shock it was and how she had to rethink her whole future. And now she's thankful to be alive, and lives each moment one at a time. I know about that, sister. What I had was not cancer, but certainly a change of plans. And so that made me not feel bad about my current "in the now" state that I'm living in.
• Because I keep doing fun things and enjoying them, probably attending to my enjoyment while it's happening a bit more than usual, but I'm not at the same time feeling sad. I'm still here, so I might as well live here. There will be time enough to live in my future during my future, when I actually get to Appleton. Am I in denial? It has served me very well during times of transition in the past. I am very in the now. But Linda Goodman says that Geminis typically act that way - make decisions quickly, live in the now until they are enacted, don't fret too much about anything. Bring it on! Geminis were meant for disruption and international transitions.
• The feeling of all the stuff I have to do before I go is just like the boulder rolling down after Indiana Jones. Or being locked up in a coffin alive.
• Can I whinge for a minute? No one is helping me. All those people who were so tearily distraught when I said I was going, where are they? No one ever asks me, "How are you doing?" No one asks, "Is there anything I can do to make it easier?" (except one and it's not wise for me to be hanging out with him too much). I have no one to call, like, now (1am) and say, "Omigod omigod omigod, which things should I have done tonight because I won't be home tomorrow to get ready for Saturday? Which things do I have to do on Sunday and which could I leave until the next Sunday? Where should I have my party? What objects do I have to move in order to free the other objects so there's room to move them? I can't think! I'm too sleepy! Omigod, I'll never get it all done!" Last couple times I did this, I had a strong, sturdy, steady man who had years of experience helping my brain with just the above sorts of matters. An engineer. A Taurus engineer. Now I am alone, alone, alone. Doing it all by myself. Which is why I'm leaving, isn't it? Okay, whinge finished. I'm tomorrow going to get inundated with phone messages saying "How are you? Is there anything I can do to help?" and they're going to irritate the fuck out of me and I'm going to snap at those people for interfering. Apologies in advance, people. It is 1am, remember, and I'm so sleepy I feel like I'm going to get pneumonia.
• This is a lovely villanelle poem by Sylvia Plath and it's haunting me: http://firasd.org/weblog/2006/03/25/i-think-i-made-you-up-inside-my-head

Help Me

Just had dinner with my ex-de-facto-step kid. She's a lovely girl - much taller and more grown-up than last time I saw her, which must have been something like Christmas last year. We had dinner together. She told me all sorts of stories of school, the drums, her first rock concert, a camping trip she'd been on. She talks too fast and on and on, so it was a little hard to hear her in the restaurant but I kept nodding and going "Oh!" at the appropriate places and we had a nice time. I still can't work out my obligations toward her, exactly, but with 13 year olds it's pretty easy, we don't have to blow this dinner up into a great hoo-ha goodbye thing. It's just dinner. I enjoy her company. I will keep in touch. I'm a grown-up who's got her back.

Two things knocked me. One, I asked her, just casually on the way to taking her back to his house, "Are you doing anything special over the summer?" "Yeah, I'm going overseas with Dad." Oh. He didn't mention. Why would he have mentioned? I haven't had any contact with him at all for like nine months. And he's studiously learned not to mention words like "Europe" in my presence. Because of reactions like this. I feel a bit knocked. He's going to take Grom, who I knew from the time she was 1 1/2, with whom I did the hard yards of weekends and school holidays for ten years, he's going to take her to meet the Other Woman.

And he gave me a copy of his book. I almost asked him to sign it and thought better of it - what would be appropriate to say? It's remarkably slender, compared to the thesis that spawned it. I'm glad to have it - actually because I need to read the bit about quantum physics and information, in order to talk to another boy altogether. I shouldn't even have looked at the acknowledgements, but how can you not? I was there, in a big list of friends, with thanks to all of us for "support and inspiration". My erstwhile friend was there and I'm not sure why - maybe they got closer than I thought before she moved away. No doubt they did. Anyway, but I thought, oh good, the Other Woman is not there at all. That's good, because she wasn't around for any of this, it was all me. "Support", as in $70,000 worth of paying his rent and child support for various periods while he was writing the thing. But then. The last name in the list. "Melinda". Her big name. Her big real name that her stupid cartoon regular name is shortened from. So, she was there. Last.

At least I was there too - a friend of mine wrote a book and in the acknowledgements he thanked the new girlfriend, "who was there at the end of the project." And it was so obvious that the old girlfriend had been there in the first draft and had been excised from the sentence. It was so clear that it had originally said, "For X, who was there at the beginning of the project, and for Y, who was there at the end of the project," but Y was a jealous sort and I'm sure made him cut X out - but the excision was so obvious that the scar was quite evident, still, in the sentence. So at least I was there in the sentence at all. Second. And he spelled my name right and everything.

But I feel knocked.

Despite the fact that I have lost my voice (did it in over the weekend talking about Free Will too loud, but that's another story), and have developed a cough that I'm quite worried about because it feels like a lung infection, an asthma complication, and I really don't have time for that just before a long flight, depite all of this and 4 hours of sleep and being knocked, I stopped off at the Clock and had a glass of house champagne and sat quietly crossing things off my list.

I have a strange desire to talk on the phone about quantum physics. But I remember the joke about the woman who has 8 hours to live ("Easy for you to say, you don't have to get up and go to work in the morning"), and I will instead wait an hour and then ring a bunch of Americans and try to get my accommodation sorted out.

Argh.

what the SMH said

From my horoscope in the SMH today:

"The thing to keep sharply in focus over the coming months is that what you have or have not is not who you are. Who you are comes from deep within; the way you love, the way you care and how pure you feel your spirit is. "

Good message for someone who's about to put all her belongings on a boat...

And maybe where you are is not who you are neither.

I Stayed

Today at work we nearly had four big projects that all had to be live by COB, before the long weekend (Close Of Business - do you Yanks use the term as well?). It turns out one didn't actually have to be live today, in fact it doesn't have to be live until November 1, and it was quite embarassing that I was the one who had misread the terms and conditions and made a big overarching schedule and got it wrong. But now most of that project is done, anyway, and we can take some time doing testing and refinement.

Still we had three big projects that all had to be live by the end of the day. Everyone has been in a flap about them for weeks, but no one would cooperate - the clients would take days to answer emails, and one only sent a purchase order for half of the quote; the other suppliers gave us things three days late with only a few hours to process; yet other suppliers started getting their own bossy ideas about how things should be done, or gave us briefs that made no sense whatsoever and then changed them anyway right at the end. It was constant, all week, and I was just thinking the thought that all our clients seemed to have brain damage when I realised my mistake about October 1/November 1 and realised I must have brain damage as well.

But the worst thing was that none of my colleagues took any ownership of these projects at all. They all went vague, and lazy, and spent all day talking on the phone or IM'ing or laughing with each other, and nothing was getting done. I delegated a couple of things to someone else to manage, and the ball was just thoroughly dropped. Maybe he thought I just wanted him to do the initial briefs and I would follow everything else up with the clients. Maybe he never heard back from the designer that the task was done. Maybe he didn't realise what the deadline was. But just at the time he was supposed to be sending an email to the client and getting signoff, he was faffing around setting up a new desk and putting his new bike together. (New bike, you are thinking? We do lots of work for a company that sells Italian bicyles, and they pay us in "contra". So everyone who wants a new bike can get one, on the boss.) I was outraged at this colleague, but didn't say anything to him, I just found out from the designer myself the work was done, and contacted the client myself to get approval, and even did all the HTML changes MYSELF, using notepad and completely hacking around our version control system. But they're done, and live.

At many points during the day I felt like just walking out of there. I kept announcing that I felt like just walking out of there. When they pulled one of the cables out of one of our most important servers, just to see what would happen and to change a setting for the people at the new desks, they timed that little activity to be just exactly when the other supplier was supposed to be busy putting content in to the site that had to be live within a half hour. She had to go make a cup of tea instead. I yelled at them in exasperation, "Why are you doing this right NOW?" I threatened to just get up and walk out of there.

One designer left at 5 - he always leaves at 5, since he gets in at precisely 8 sharp every day, and also he's going away for two weeks to get married. One programmer left at 6, later than usual because he'd stayed to chat with the boss about the cable thing they were doing. One designer was there pretty late but she was working on a project separate from what I was working on. What I was working on, only the senior developer and I stayed. He kept working and testing and publishing and looking into my error messages and coming up with clever solutions, and kept his sense of humor, and when the boss came in a flap and asked him to do something else altogether he just calmly said, "Yep," and kept on doing five things at once and making sure they were all right.

We were the only two, plus the boss, who you'd expect to care if things got done or not. We were the only two that stayed to make sure the job was done properly and the deadlines were met and the customers would not have bad experiences. We were there until 7:30, on the Friday night of a long weekend. I really didn't want to be there at all, starting from about 11 o'clock in the morning, I could see what kind of day it was going to be. And I've already resigned! I'm only going to work there for three more weeks. I have nothing at stake any more, I could be slacking off, I could even start telling off the clients who've been making my life miserable for two years. (Actually it's never a good idea to do that, you never know which bridge you're going to have to turn and run back across one day.) But I did none of these things, I instead took personal responsibility that all the things got done, properly and on time.

Personal responsibility. I just accepted it. I was the only one who was going to make sure it all got done, and communicated to everyone who needed to know. I wasn't panicky, I didn't stress the designers out (I made them proud that they had gone the extra mile and finished the impossible task in time - two of them strutted over to my desk with chests out, to tell me!). I took command, I managed, I stayed back until 7:30, I checked everything, I made sure everything was live that needed to be live. Why do some people take personal responsibility, and others do not?

I suppose it makes me employable. I think it would make me a good mother, if it came to that. But it does make me frustrated with other people. And it makes me very tired!