vagranting

to answer my critics: yes, i’ve been busy and yes, i’ve been lazy… and um, not much has been happening lately? i’ll be getting my new car (hopefully, unless further dramas unfold) in the next week. also, 2 mates and i are moving into a shared place. we’re inspecting rentals in the first week of december. i’ve also begun working at a studio on a part time, freelance basis, with will lin from qca. major life events: covered.

but in more mundane news, i’ve been exploiting the high aussie dollar (around when it was hitting 93 cents) and going a little crazy buying shirts online. i picked up 6 shirts from oddica (10% discount code: shiftedsound), 3 of which have arrived thus far, and i’m very happy with. also this item from threadless ($3 discount code: RUBBERDANPANTS), both of which i scored at thriftee prices. also scored some neat new glasses (the $$$ prescription kind) for a measly $40 delivered from optical4less. i was kind of sceptical of how the end result would turn out, but i must say i’ve been pleasantly surprised. the frames are a little heavy, but for the price, they’re flipping awesome! anyhow, the craving for conspicuous consumption has been quenched — at least until the post-christmas sales. i need to raise me some bond money.

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alright — so it’s been a over a month since i got back, and thus, an overly long time since the last post — sorry.

life has been heading back into both familiar and new territories for me since then. i picked up working again 3 days a week at my old job (northside), which along with freelance projects has been keeping me rather busy.

also slowly creeping up on me: the realisation that i must now begin to construct a normal, grown-up working life for myself, pretty much from scratch. or perhaps negative-scratch. i’ve taken a few steps in the direction — found a car, got a loan, seen a tax accountant, looking for potential house-mates and rentals.

of course, adjusting to getting back hasn’t been easy. the thing i miss most: the buzz of exploring. the thing which bothers me most: the obligatory “how was your trip?” without caring to give enough time for a meaningful answer. i really feel like telling them “there is no 10 second answer to that”, but instead, i say “good”, like a moron (but a socially acceptable moron) and skulk off.

another unanswered question is “where was your favourite place?” the fault there is mine, for not having a favourite i suppose. london, paris, chicago and berlin were all great cities, i tell them, but all in different ways… that’s what made them interesting to me anway. now that i think about it, those are the cities where i had a friends to show me around too.

it’s eerie in a certain way — coming back to a place where everyone and everything is the same, but you’re different. perhaps not different in a way other can see, but changed inside. but for the moment, i’m making brisbane home.

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so i’m typing this message from my old house in samford. which will be vacated and sold by 3.00pm tomorrow. it’s a strange thought. it’s been slightly frustrating to have such a large task looming over the family home this week, while i’ve tried to relax. but it hasn’t been so strange getting back as i thought it would be. in fact the most surreal thing is how quickly everything has appeared to go back to normal.

i haven’t driven a car, made an espresso, slept in my own room for a week or gone out with a large group of friends in 7 months, but it’s just clicked back in place. which is reassuring, and also disconcerting.

in the next few weeks i’ll be trying to sort through the several thousand photographs which have yet to be processed, and summarise what i have experienced, learned and enjoyed along the way. i think if there has been a theme to the journey it would be: plan b aka. improvisation 101.

more to follow.

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so, i’m in hong kong, with a couple of days left before i finally get home. i’ve realised a couple of things being here:

1. i am a banana. yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
2. while i had my doubts at times through this trip, yes, heat is worse than cold.
3. i’m glad i came here at the end of my trip. there’s a lot of cheap junk here to buy, and i would have been torn about buying it if i had to lug it across europe.

i’ll leave it brief, and make the reflections on the trip as a whole when I get back.

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