Primarily it’s the fact that I’m pretty tired of cold, wet weather but my thoughts are turning to magic portals and instant travel back to Adelaide in the next couple of weeks. While I love Spring in Adelaide and would happily return for visits in October, future returns home will probably happen in February and March as that’s the time when Adelaide really comes alive!

Visitors to Adelaide during festival season (Adelaide Festival of Arts, Fringe Festival and Womadelaide) are given a strange impression of the town, there are people energised and out partying on the streets every night! There’s culture down every alley and even if you don’t like ‘culture’, there’s also a very loud car race which happens around the same time. The rest of the year, while it can be difficult to remember the party face the city puts on, it is still a lovely place that I miss.

Foolishly I’ve managed to miss out Adelaide Fringe and most frustratingly, Womadelaide for the last few years as I always seemed to book my flights back to Europe in winter just in time for slushy side walks and freezing winds.

If you’ve never experienced Womadelaide festival you really should. For three days the most beautiful park in Adelaide is full of world music, hippies and happy, relaxed, white-middle class families wearing ethnic clothing bought at the previous year’s festival. It is a time of picnics, temporary camps under amazing old trees, children wandering around and playing diablo, amazing art installations and all my favourite people.

This year I feel even more sad that I don’t get to be in Adelaide at this most wonderful of times as during Fringe there’ll also be the first Format Festival, run by some very dear friends of mine. Only last week did I realise that maybe I should have tried to organise a simultaneous Academy of DIY here in Berlin as part of my DIYMasters project. So while there won’t be a Berlin Academy of DIY this March, I’m hoping that in the next couple of months I’ll organise a similar event celebrating self-organised learning and informal teaching and community.

I won’t be around in Adelaide for the festivals this year, but if you’re in Australia make your way over to my home town and have fun on my behalf. During February / March 2010 though, is when I’m planning on making a short return to a festival filled Adelaide, my friends and family and the smells of dry earth and eucalyptus leaves. Until then, I’m looking forward to watching Berlin move from grey skies to blue and experiencing this city as it wakes from its winter hibernation.

There’s far too much to say about everything right now, but after an inspiring Futuresonic conference in Manchester I followed a hunch and visited a fellow conference attendee in Sheffield. We don’t know what it is yet, but there’s something good going on.

Rather than regret not doing anything and returning to Australia in the next month or so, I’m going to take the safer risk and stay in Sheffield for a while to actually get to know this young man. So, the hunt is on for a job, a flat, some dirt to garden in and new experiences.

More to come…

I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed this mental phenomena or if it even has a name, but hopefully I’ll describe it in a way that makes sense.

You might regularly pass along a street and so the facades of buildings become familiar. Then for some reason, an appointment, the purchase of a specific item, you enter one of the buildings and it is no longer a facade facing a street, but a real(ised), three-dimensional space filled with people, objects and stories. From that point on, whenever you pass along that street, you can comprehend the form of the building, and as such it becomes far easier to imagine what might be happening inside. The physical world is still the same size, but somehow the representation of its space in your head and imagination has become larger.

This is not to say that you can’t imagine what is behind a facade without walking through it, but imagining becomes far easier once you have a collection of the real in your mind to draw from.

I feel that it’s the same with people. Names and faces are facades, but until we interact with another person’s mental and emotional space, it is much harder to imagine what that person’s life is like. Of course, once you begin to know a person, it is like rooms in their self open up in your mind. As with physical spaces, the more human spaces you know, makes it easier to imagine what an unknown person is experiencing and feeling.

Almost two years ago I ended up living in Finland. An imagined land of snow and Moomintrolls was now a three-dimensional space of parks and lakes and islands and streets, cafes, kitchens and living rooms, workspaces and tram-tracks. The abstracted population of “Suomi” became a community of real people, people with stories and feelings and goals and failures. They were mothers, fathers, coworkers, customers, bank-tellers, friends and strangers I smiled at on endless summer days as we drank cider in parks.

About a year later, back in Australia, the news of a school shooting in Jokela, a few hours north of Helsinki, really shook me. This was a violent act taking place in a culture that I had come to know, even though I hadn’t visited the town. I could imagine the faces of the students, what clothes they wore and food they ate, how they spoke and interacted with their families. My exposure to people and places meant that the Jokela violence affected me far more intensely than similar incidents in the United States, a country I have never visited.

Surely this wasn’t a just way for me to react? What makes the lives of people we can’t easily imagine less valuable than those who are already “real” in our minds? Sometimes, imagining and remembering places and people I know, feels far more authentic than the empathy I can muster together for people I am _just_ imagining. Then I have to remind myself that I’m not alone in the continual practice of combining memory, place, people and imagining to understand more about the world.

As far as I can tell, this practice of imagination and empathy for people takes me one step closer to becoming compassionate in the true sense. In isolation from people, compassion is possible, but difficult. However, once you know how some individuals feel, it is far easier to feel empathy and thereby be moved to compassion towards a greater number of people.

To me, that is why travel is so important in making a person grow towards a better state of being. Countries which may have just been marketing images in a magazine now become real, living spaces full of life and smells and sound. When traveling, one is not just confronted by new spaces, they’re also meeting new people and learning their experiences and stories.

Exposed to new people and places your heart begins to stretch so it can accommodate and acknowledge these amazing new experiences and memories. Of course, once it becomes easier for your heart and mind to feel and empathise, it also becomes far easier to miss and long for the places and people you are no longer near. Despite the longing and missing, you know that you can always experience just one more place and make connections with a few more people, safe in the knowledge that your heart will stretch that little bit more.

I had a feeling today that it would be snowing in Helsinki, and it turns out my intuition is right!

Hopefully the reflections off the snow help keep my friends happier through the scary dark month of November. And the fact that it’s November already means that in less than 3 months I’ll be getting on a plane to head back over to the other side of the world. I can’t wait to go back to Finland and visit other parts of the world, but at the same time I really don’t want to leave my lovely hometown.

i know. i miss you! by Fighting Tiger.

A few months ago I tried to articulate to a friend who’s spent some time living in Japan the feeling that you get when you’ve really fallen for another culture and group of friends. It’s not that you don’t love your origins anymore, but that your heart just stretches and gets bigger to fit all the new people and experiences in. It is a frustrating experience, because you know that if you spend a significant amount of time in either place you’ll always end up missing what you don’t have.

Lately I’ve been desiring specific experiences that were easily come by in Finland – as I can still talk to my friends and listen to the music, the experiences I was looking for were mainly culinary. Last week I tried to find cheese equivalent to the rather bland Finnish juusto and a rye bread similar to the amazing black bread splits I lived off – but to no avail. I’ve also been regularly stocking up on Dutch salt liquorice in a desperate attempt to capture the ever so slightly different taste of salmiakki. On a trip to Ikea I stocked up on gloggi (mulled wine) mix, lingonberry jam and was over the moon to find a carton of blueberry soup. The lingonberry jam will be dolloped on spinach pancakes (pinaattiohukainen), and breakfasts for the next week will be porridge with cinammon (canelli) and blueberry soup stirred in. Pure comfort food.

Finnish Christmas Food by Fighting Tiger.

As Christmas rushes towards us, I’m planning on making piparkakut (gingerbreads) to eat while sipping on vodka spiked gloggi, and maybe I’ll even attempt to make some of the traditional casseroles. Carrot and rice casseroles will be easy to recreate – but my favourite casserole was made of lantuu (rutabaga or swedes) which is a winter vegetable, so that will have to wait for another time.

Despite the possibility to recreate the culinary experiences of Finland, the consumption will not be entirely satisfactory, as the food may be real, but the experience will be a simulacra of something I remembered. I’ll pick nettles to dry for tea and sit down to my porridge and blueberry soup for breakfast, but I won’t be eating it in the company of Ninnu, Sid and Ronja. In February, when I’m sitting down with the people that I miss in kitchens on the other side of the world, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll pull out my tube of Vegemite and be plotting the creation of pie floaters in an attempt to taste the memories of this side of the world.

pie floater prototype by Fighting Tiger.

Dad isn’t the kind of guy to get flustered, or to admit that he’s upset. But I wish wish wish that I could be there to give him hugs and help.

I woke up about half an hour ago. My dad rang to let me know that Minnie, my grandmother and friend had died. I’m sad, but because she was so diminished by age, I am incredibly relieved.

Minnie was 99. But she used to be young.

Time is flying, so surely that means I’ve been having fun?

What started as a survival technique 6 months ago (stop somewhere, recover, think, get a job for the summer) is now just everyday life.

I have: furniture; books; clothes; things I should be getting done; some ideas of what I might do with my life; the barest minimum of Finnish language skills; a few incredibly good friends who I would lay down my life for; a reputation (amongst some of my regular customers) as the best barmaid in Helsinki; an addiction to The Wire and a desire to go more places.

Lately a lot of my new music has been discovered via Library 10, mp3 blogs and mix CDs received from near and far. I’ve also started a regular regime of listening to the 13.3GB of undiscovered songs lurking in my ITunes collection from marathon downloading sessions and the 300 CDs I ripped before leaving Australia. As a result, I can highly recommend Dumas, Smoosh, Bishop Allen, The Doves, Rachel’s, Johnny Cash, Feist, Regina Spektor, Lovage, Sufjan Stevens, Peter Bjorn & John, Emiliana Torrini, Against Me!, Mason Jennings, Whiskey Smile, Le Man Avec Les Lunettes, Magyar Posse, Willy Mason, and Chikinki.

But I also spend most of my waking time at the bar which, as I don’t have a working MP3 player, usually limits my music listening to the never changing songs on the work computer. And it means that artists I’ve previously written off as “too commercial” or “too daggy” have been given careful, repeated listenings and I’ve grown to love them.

Songs by bands like Coldplay, Jet, Gnarls Barkley, The Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crowded House, Men At Work, The Cardigans, Tom Jones, Jack Johnson, Icehouse, Kubb and Powderfinger had to be my breakup songs. Over the summer, those were the songs I listened to again and again, alongside the tracks by Jens Lekman, Fiona Apple and Spoon, which were stuck on my phone’s memory card for 3 months straight.

As a teenager I had a desire to “pre-know” things before they were cool. I wanted the songs I liked to be all mine and for them to fit a certain indie credibility. While I loved, loved, loved the songs for the music and words that they were, I did edit what I chose to listen to, based on what I felt to be appropriate for a weird kid such as myself.

Of course, if I was resistant to shaping a public identity using genre and popularity based musical signs, I wouldn’t be writing this post, displaying a Last.fm playlist or blogging a music meme.

Now though, more than ever, I am far more relaxed now about what music I let myself listen and relate to. I’m open to listening for the connection between any song and the moment that I’m experiencing.

Some of the connections and the meanings that can be drawn are just plain obvious and heartbreaking.

Today I let myself look at Dan’s blog for the first time since September. Following the recent loss of his camera, inevitable discussions about items left in storage at my parents’ houses had to be taken care of. That little bit of email contact meant that I felt relaxed and brave enough to have a peek, just enough to know where in the world he happened to be.

The track that shuffled into sound while I was reading? The Special Two by Missy Higgins, a song guaranteed to break my heart every time I listen to it.

:::…

[There's this moment in Neil Finn's She Will Have Her Way just before he sings "Still No End In Sight...". Those moments are in the final chords of Bad Girls Of The Bible's 88 Keys, in Soul Coughing's True Dreams Of Wichita and it's there as Buck 65 intones "'cause when it comes to rockin' something fierce, mmm do i" in 463. Those moments of tension are why I listen to music].

How many of you have read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman yet? Anybody? No? I mentioned the books a while ago?

Well, if you have got around to reading the trilogy you’ll understand what powerful stuff “dust” is. An amazing elementary particle that is all around us, particles that know what is going on, that react to being observed, particles which are believed to be the embodiment of “original sin”…

A while ago I was really excited to hear about the Global Consciousness Project “designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement.” The hypothesis is that when a huge amount of the world’s population is thinking of the same thing, randomly generated numbers collected from “EGGs” will be more likely to demonstrate non-random patterns.

Data which has appeared to be more non-random appeared around the time of global events such as the September 11 attacks, “the funeral ceremonies of Princess Diana, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, a few minutes around midnight on any New Years Eve and public events such as Live 8.”

Could it be something like dust that transmits global consiousness? The EGG’s used to collect data aren’t that different from the apparatus Mary Malone uses to connect to the shadow particles in the third book of the Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass.

So, it’s been possible to observe deviations away from standard random number probability after the occurrence of an unplanned global event. However, how about planning to influence the global consciousness at a specific time?

One such event planned in the next month or so is the world’s first Global Orgasm “coming” up on December 22nd, 2006, the winter solstice.

The mission of the Global Orgasm is to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy. Now that there are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti- submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!

The intent is that the participants concentrate any thoughts during and after orgasm on peace. The combination of high-energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers.

The goal is to add so much concentrated and high-energy positive input into the energy field of the Earth that it will reduce the current dangerous levels of aggression and violence throughout the world.

from the Global Orgasm organisation’s Mission Statement.

Call me a hippy if you want, but I really love this concept as it involves the movement towards world peace, mathematical analysis, positive thinking and of course good sex whether it’s with someone else or by yourself.

So, I know how I’m planning on celebrating the shortest day of the year… How about you? What and who are you going to be doing?

There is of course, a blog associated with Global Orgasm day.  And to keep you up to date with the countdown there’s a Dashboard widget for Macintosh users.  Here’s a wikipedia entry on the Global Consciousness Project which does offer some scientific criticism of the data analysis techniques. And here are two books looking at the science behind His Dark Materials.

There was a period a couple of months ago when I wasn’t speaking with Dan. We weren’t emailing, but I was still reading his blog. Then, we started communicating again, maybe it was too soon, maybe it was in the wrong medium, but ultimately I had to stop. Everything. The communication. The consumption. The man who I thought would come back to [visit] me was moving further and further away.

It just seemed easier to push him out of my life myself.

I have to admit that my heart is much easier when I’m not reading what adventures he’s having. Even though he’s gone down a different path than the one we’d have travelled together, he’s probably still moving around, he’s still living the dream that we both left Australia with. And that has been and would be incredibly difficult to read about.

Like hearing of your ex-lover’s new partner, the shared home, the first child. The realisation that they seem to be happy without you. That the dreams you shared can be lived out without you. [You forget that you can be, are, already happy without them.]

The other stuff will reach me through rumours or maybe direct communication further down the track. The immediate dream of travel, the journeys and adventures that we were going to make together. Those are the things that make me heartbroken and jealous.

A whole lot of issues meant that travelling became really difficult for me. I left Australia on the tail end of work-related anxiety, with a bleeding cervix, sleep deprivation, limited funds and an ultimate desire to travel, but not right then. My pack was artfully arranged with all the gear a girl, a couple, could possibly need for 6 months, a year, 5 years, however long on the road, but my mental and emotional state was not prepared, not geared up to be on the road continuously.

In retrospect, the timing seemed to be all wrong, but it was convenient. Just not for me.

Compromises are made, but sometimes they end up just being concessions.

:::…

I have an idea that now he’s heading to Eastern Europe and possibly to Turkey and the Middle East too. That’s tough.

I really wanted to go to Iran with him. I dreamt of taking him to Turkey: to watch him drink plentiful cups of strong sweet tea; to wash our feet in the rivers at the birthplace of civilisation; to share the simplest, best food I’ve ever had in my life.

It doesn’t come across in my blog entries, but in my old journals, my photographs, my heart and mind, the time I spent in Turkey with Rick, Tish, Simon and John remains my ultimate travel experience. So maybe it was better that I didn’t go back there with Dan.

:::…

There are moments when I feel paralysed about doing anything.

Like falling in love ever again:

I’m happy to hang out with other people again. To go out on dates and flirt and make out and all that jazz ballet.

Relationships though… That buzz and the excitement. The daydreaming. Love. Commitment and involvement. Realising that the opening up, the unburdening, the sacrifice of the boxes which keep things safe and separate and which was done because I never thought I’d have to do it with anyone else, will have to happen again. The frustration of expectations not met, the crankiness of miscommunication and the confusion at not passing someone’s secret test. The utter destruction left behind at the end.

I have been there, too often. The high water mark of what love is and can be was reached with Dan, but like a flood it left behind a whole lot of destruction and trash. Like a flood it could just have been a freak occurance.

I don’t think that I can let myself put anyone else through that, let alone myself.

I may steer clear of that situation for a while. It might not rain any time soon either.
Like being single:

There are times in my life, especially in the last three months, when being single has sucked so terribly. Being [newly] single, halfway around the world in a new town is a blessing (no memories), but ultimately a curse. You can get hugs, but they aren’t the hugs of a mother or a best friend who knows all of your secrets. You can talk to a friend, but it’s not over Drift’s Mushroom Bruschetta, or in their living room, it’s hunched over a laptop via Skype.

But I know that I can be happy and single. I’ve done that in the last three months. And I’ve done it so many other times before.

I’m more capable and calmer and awesome when I’m single because I’m concentrated, unadulterated me.

Like travelling:

I love the time I’m spending here in Finland. I really do. I already have friends who I will treasure for the rest of my life, a second home emerging and a culture beginning to sink into me. Yet I wish that I had the strength and the money and the drive to be on the road too.

Was it the travel that made the relationship bad? Or was it the relationship that made the travel bad? Or was it a set of other preconditions that influenced my life so that I’m here, now?

Travel from China to Russia got worse and worse. I hated Russia. I hated myself. I was beginning to hate Dan. It was enjoyable less than 5% of the time. It was bearable a bit more of the time. It sucked a hell of a lot most of the time.

Now I’m incredibly scared to go off and travel by myself again, despite dreaming about it. Was everything that went wrong my fault? Yes, I cried a lot. I threw tantrums. But I was not travelling on my terms or at my pace. I was confused and emotional.

I know that I can travel well. I did that for 6 months by myself 4 years ago.

So I’ll do it again. Baby steps first though. I’ll get on a plane and go to Rome for five days and hang out with Pete and do stuff by myself too.

I can go to Turkey again. I’ll get to Burning Man and drive a cool campervan around Australia. I’ll catch more trains and meet new people. I’ll get to Valparaiso in Chile and Tibet which is not in China.

I figured that this time would come. I’d start working fulltime again and the morning pages and the energy and drive to create would pretty much disappear.
Which is bad. It’s been a crazy three weeks. I should have been writing for myself everyday, but sleep and chaos took over.

Stubby visited which was awesome.

I got my laptop back.

I had a couple of tough days at work.

I got angry and didn’t keep my mouth shut when feelings for that old flame reared its beautifuluglyheartbreakinghead when a new flame for the old one was mentioned in a letter responding to my previous days of misery. Nice timing.

I moved flat. I hate moving. Especially when I do it by myself.

I started working most weekdays.

I visited my “family” in Finland (i.e. Ninnu, Sid, Ronja and their new puppy Pedro).

I met a sweet boy with nice eyes.

I went to see bands and realised that I am at home wherever there is music.

I worked six days in a row. €uro but oucho.
So, my sleep pattern is now shifted to that of a day worker again and I can go out on weekends. My room is very untidy. I’ve discovered that Doctor Who shows on Sunday nights here and Lost plays on Thursdays. I head to Rome at the end of the month, and eventually to Vaasa to visit Jade.

:::…

As soon as September arrived it became obvious that seasons actually mean something here. After a lifetime of seasons regarded as a European construct layered onto a foreign environment, it’s strange to feel that Autumn started almost to the calendar day. Clothes need to be layered and a scarf worn against chills. There’s a whole lot more rain and I’m thinking about buying some hot pink gumboots…

In keeping with that footwear theme… Maybe I could get my hot pink uggboots posted over for my birthday? [Hint to Alex, Dad and Nick!]