I am smitten. I’m not normally smitten. Infact usually I’m quite bitter. When presented with public displays of affection I’d usually roll my eyes or exclaim, “GET A ROOM!” But not after this weekend. This weekend I saw a couple kissing and I thought, “I remember that. That’s nice. We should do that again some time.”

Being smitten changes you. It changes your world and leaves you wearing a ridiculous grin. Hell I even listened to love song ‘dedications’ on the inflight radio on the way home. And even though sometimes the expressions of love were clunky and awkward, they still seemed adorable.

It was wonderful. It really was quite transformative. I would cross the Victoria Bridge to get to the Brisbane State Library with this ridiculous grin on my face and a bounce in my step. It was truly magical.

So, to all of the people who made my Brisbane experience so wonderful – and one in particular – thank you.

I don’t normally do this here. But here goes nothing…

• I went to Brisbane over the weekend for the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, Brisbane Twestival, Riverfire and just to meet up with friends generally. Overall it was lovely. Infact it was such a vast improvement on my daily life here in Nowra that I am sad and lonely and emo to be back.
• One of the more surreal moments of the Brisbane trip though was being interrogated by a journalist at Twestival. In fairness, he told me that he would just keep asking questions until I started asking him some or told him to ‘fuck off.’ But, yes, anyway, I was telling him about the websites I run… And the part that seemed really comical to me was when he insisted that I must just be being modest. This really made me laugh. Because, to me, nobody cares about any of this crap I do. I don’t know what compells me to do it. Frankly some days even I don’t care and that’s why they don’t get updated. It just seemed funny to me that people want to assume I’m so much more interesting and functional than I am.
• I am looking for some sort of employment. The local options seem really narrow (sadly I’m not a nurse, mehanic, baker, or psychologist) and my qualifications are a bit eclectic. The part where I really fall down here though is that I don’t network. I don’t participate very much in this town. I barely know anybody. I guess I need to do that more. But I’m also going to see if I can do some TAFE short courses in a few things to add to my repetoire. (Tourism is a big thing in this area and it is also where most of my experience exists, I guess.)
• Brisbane was quite liberating, because I could be myself. The flipside of this, however, was that when I got home I felt more constricted than ever. I was prone to bouts of great anxiety and depression. Two of my dearest friends in the world both suggested I talk to someone and I am pretty sure I have alienated both of them by telling them in no uncertain terms that this is something I do not intend to do. And yet, they’re probably right. The more I go through my life the more I realise the things that tear me up inside are the things that are left unsaid. I just don’t want to say them because I fear impending doom… and even that feels slightly disingenuous to my family. It is rooted in a childhood fear where the safest action was always to bite one’s tongue and hope something would change, organically, with the passing of time. But I guess it won’t change by itself. I guess I need to change it. I’m not a kid anymore.
• Somebody who broke my heart into a million pieces is having a birthday shortly. Ironically it is the day after Talk Like A Pirate Day – how could I forget that combination? I was thinking about making a video for them. But I probably shouldn’t. I mean I could easily upload that song I wrote about them breaking my heart, on their birthday… But, as much as I am hurting, I don’t think I want to become that person, you know?
• I don’t know what it is about my brain, that it is somehow hardwired to dwell on the depressing… Some really amazing things happened over the weekend. And while I was there I was frequently sporting a big demented smitten grin, and for the first time in a very long time there was a bounce in my step. And it was wonderful. And if I’m being really very honest with you I am absolutely terrified that I’m going to do something to fuck it up. And that would be the greatest travesty of all. But I need to just relax and be less neurotic, and things will work out. Probably. I have to believe that. That is what I’m working with now.

According to Wikipedia:

The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. Of course the butterfly cannot literally cause a tornado. The kinetic energy in a tornado is enormously larger than the energy in the turbulence of a butterfly. The kinetic energy of a tornado is ultimately provided by the sun and the butterfly can only influence certain details of weather events in a chaotic manner.

The Butterfly Effect was the second thing to occur to me after I watched two consecutive news stories this morning. The first was about severe flooding and hail storms to hit Brisbane (Queensland, Australia). There had been damage to buildings and cars, power outages, water contamination issues. A man had died after he and another man had entered a storm drain to take photographs. I can’t begin to imagine what the pair were photographing. The other news story related to the fires sweeping across Los Angeles. I was impressed that two places on opposite sides of the world could be affected by two remarkably different weather patterns and yet, somehow, the end result was largely the same. I wondered if they could’ve been triggered by the flap of one insidious butterfly or some other seemingly innocuous event.

But more than that I wondered about my friends in Brisbane and Los Angeles. I’ve never been to either though I have friends in both, and family in Brisbane. The internet has conspired to connect me to people from all around the world and every now and then a piece of news fodder will be followed immediately by the thought, “I wonder if [person x] is okay?”

Earlier tonight I was talking to one of my friends in Los Angeles. Yesterday she and her family were getting ready to be evacuated. She told me it was a scary feeling. I couldn’t begin to imagine. Fortunately evacuation didn’t prove to be necessary for her section of the region and other than staying indoors to avoid the particles in the air that would provoke her asthma she seemed to be largely unaffected. Then she started sending me photographs from different websites of the area in quick succession. She sent me one of her former high school – it was little more than a sign in front of a black charcoaled empty field. Then she sent me a video. She suggested that the burnt out building at 5:08 was actually her former classroom.

She said ‘brb – I need to show my parents these photographs.’ Within seconds, ironically, a friend from Brisbane appeared on MSN Messenger. She sent me a photograph of the storm. She informed me that the power had only just been switched on. Within minutes of the power returning she started uploading a video of her yard and her next door neighbour’s yard to YouTube.

Somehow it is a different experience hearing about these events from people who have experienced them. Sure it is good to know things. It is wonderful to hear about things on the news – but what (other than that they happened) do I learn in this way? It is the difference between memorizing battle dates and reading soldiers’ diaries. In an odd way we have taken new technologies and subjected them to age old traditions of storytelling. This is something we had lost as we allowed media sources to tell our stories. This was something we had lost in a world where the only authors whose voices would be heard were those selected by large publishing firms.

It is deeply exciting, and, yet, within the same breath deeply horrifying. We have a renewed medium for expression and the Australian Government is hell bent on censoring it. Perhaps they are fearful of the liberties it permits their citizens to have? Perhaps they liked the world better when the only sources of information were those handed out by the government itself and a handful of media operators? Part of me wonders if Senator Conroy’s opinion of the internet wouldn’t change if a tragedy befell a part of the world that contained people he loved. Perhaps then he could understand the need to permit the internet to continue to maintain its current speed and integrity?