I Regret that I Do Have *Some* Serious Obligations to Attend to

I promise that I will post the remainder of my New Zealand journal before next week begins! For now I just wanted to say hello, that I do love Melbourne and have found a dear friend in Terri, and am having lots of exciting discussions with Kristian, and that I'll never finish all the work I have to get done while I'm here! Ack! (That's a good, happily-busy "ack", you will note. Sorry if that didn't come through). Kristian may have convinced me to write my dissertation on entanglement... to think about spending a good, solid year (I WILL write it in 12 months I WILL, I WILL) pondering the metaphysical implications of an aspect of the physical world that the physicists themselves hardly take into account, yet which is so deeply entrenched in our current theories and remains a great mystery... yeah. I think I can do that. !!!

Yesterday night I couldn't sleep. I was too happy and high-strung thinking about certain...events... that have transpired of late and all that they entail. So at about 5:30am I gave up, showered and dressed, and went into the city. I had breakfast at a little restaurant down an alleyway that I'm certain I could never find back and can't remember the name of. It was marvelous. Two tall men dressed entirely in black served me, their only wee-hour patron, a flat white (espresso with milk) and steaming apple/cinnamon crepes topped with maple syrup and cocoa powder. Excellent. Breakfast or brunch is always such a difficult decision- what do go with, something sweet or something savory? My choice was between the crepes and a basil-infused eggs Benedict (you say "bAH-sil" here, not "BAY-sil". Jodie taught me that). Very difficult choice. When you're dining with friends you can share (Teasel, I would have made you order the eggs) and then you split half-savory and half-sweet, and it is truly the best of both worlds. As you see, I went with sweet; I have ridiculous sweet...tooths. If you could only eat one category of food for breakfast for the rest of your life, sweet or savory, which would you choose? I wonder if this means anything deep and significant about us as persons. Probably not. But Tall Skinny Man Dressed in Black Number One rang me up after the meal, and noticing my Notre Dame card, told me he'd gone to high school nearby, up in Michigan. I asked whereabout, and he seemed skeptical I'd heard of the place, but then said "Grand Rapids."
"I went to Calvin!" I said, probably too enthusiastically. We smile, thinking to ourselves what the odds are of meeting some other person in a back alley at 6 in the morning on the other side of the world who has actually eaten at Yesterdog and knows about that giant orange sculpture-thingy downtown that's on all the GR paraphernalia. It was nice. I felt a little less alone in the big world.

Yesterday, because I hadn't slept the night before and had been working since 8 am, I left work at 4 to go see a movie premier at a local cinema. The movie was called The Band's Visit. It's an independent film about an eight-member Egyptian police band that gets stuck overnight in an Israeli town, and it's won heaps of awards from Cannes and Toronto and in Sydney. But I must confess: while it was a fine movie, I felt as though it wasn't for me--that I wasn't supposed to be watching it, somehow. It was extremely subtle-- the essence of deadpan-- based on tensions between Israelis and Arabs. But not having a deep or personal understanding of that conflict, or of the relationship between these peoples, the point the film was trying to make (by *not* trying to make it, as is the wont of better indie films) elluded me. I'm sad for it, but it just did not affect me like it was meant to. And there was a much smaller role for music in the film than one would hope, given that it is about a band. I hope the warm reception of the film elsewhere speaks to the something that I couldn't relate to, the something that makes it great.

After the movie, I wandered around Melbourne for a while trying to stay awake until a decent hour. I stopped in a posh clothing store empty of all but 3 women--the clerks-- who all looked extremely bored, extremely tired, and who were gossiping about someone. I picked out the most fantastic, expensive dress I could find-- a red silk dress-- to try it on and convince them I might actually be able to spend that much money on a dress far too fancy and flashy for my present state of affairs. I mean, this would be the sort of dress you'd buy if you were the sort of person Gerard Butler might ask to an awards show. It was THAT kind of red dress. So I took my time trying it on, and it was fabulous to wear. Then I started to feel a little bad for leading the clerks on in that way. I mean, now all of them were swarming around convincing me I MUST have this dress, and that it looked perfect with my eyes and hair and height and nose shape and zodiac sign and.... and finally I felt so bad that (after taking a loooong time to change back out of the dress again) instead of just saying "Neat, but I don't think I want it. Ta!" and leaving those poor, paid-on-commission souls, I ended up lying and saying "I really will think about it... I will." So here I am, fulfilling my obligation to think about it. Plus, there's always the off-chance that Mr. Butler will in fact ask me to some posh event or other in the next two weeks. Though he is, being Scottish, most likely in Scotland at the moment. And he's also a movie star, so there's that.

Enough of that drivel. I went back to the flat after my affair with the red silk dress, fell asleep on Terri's green couch, dreamt about space travel and ultimate frisbee (don't ask), and awoke this morning at 10:30. It's a beautiful sunny day, and I just had a tasty lunch at a local deli with Kristian (p.s. I've gone vegetarian again. I have to admit it... I really am no longer the carnivore I once was. I just can't... enjoy meat the same way anymore). We had a fascinating chat, talking more about my dissertation, and about his paper for the Giant, Important Conference. Now I'm writing from my darling little (big) office. (To answer your question, Brooke: I post from Bo (my labtop) using the Uni Wireless, and the same from Uni Sydney, but at the Baalbergen's and at Terri's I post from home computers via ethernet. Can I ask *why* you wanted to know? They do have wireless in Australia. They also have too many iPods and blackberries and other annoying American things, like SUVs and cell phones that ring in loud, electro-synthesized hack versions of Für Elise or Rondo Alla Turk....ack. Beethoven, Mozart and the lot of them must be barfing from the beyond. It's like using a Grecian urn to pee in. If you can get the recording to sound like a real recording, then great. But none of this electronic, synthesizer-of-the-80s-era ringtones. Barf, barf, again I say barf.)

I love my office here. I've mentioned this before I think, but my desk faces three large old windows, which look down into a courtyard with dark green grass (despite the "winter") and four enormous pink flowering bushes. I'll take a picture at some point for you. My office, having the past occupation of housing a few graduate students and a visiting philosophy professor, also has the virtue of containing just those quirky props you'd expect a philosophy office to have. There are tea-stained mugs and dirty spoons, nothing on the walls except a white board (yeah! I have a white board!) and a Garfield cartoon in German (thank goodness I can read German), and of course, shelves and shelves of books, papers and journals on symbolic logic, linear and relevance logic, introductory logic, and the art of reasoning( I think I can guess at the former inhabitant's specialization), semantics and phil mind, causality and philosophy of physics, and one shelf of just the classics: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Aristotle, Russell, Kant, ooh! and a book by Notre Dame's own dear Bob Audi. There is also a giant rubber-band ball in the corner, about 8 inches in diameter, with which I plan to amuse myself shortly, a black-and-white framed photograph of a train engine (not hung), and in the middle of the floor lay a single brick wrapped in brown paper on which is written "This is not a brick." That one's for you, Uncle Alex. I would take the particles-arranged-brick-wise home for you, but I'm afraid I'm already having to ship a few things back due to weight restrictions (consider yourselves warned: leaving the U.S. you are allowed TWO 50- lb. bags. Traveling anywhere ELSE internationally, you are only allowed ONE 20-kg bag. That's about 44 lbs. total.) In any case, I'm sure the U.S. has plenty of their own bricks. Oops, I mean particles-arranged-brick-wise. (Why can't you bee like the rest of us and stop pretending you don't believe in everyday objects? I don't care what PVI says.)

Now I must delve back into my work for a few hours. But as I promised, I will not leave you in suspense much longer about NZ. I never meant to do that in the first place... I just realized that I only have two more weeks left to research here, and to explore Melbourne. Not enough time...must work faster...must eat more than three meals a day... ooh, that rubber-band ball looks like fun.