Stuff

I don’t really feel like I’m back in the world just yet, but I have to be.

I’ve been dream­ing about <pred­ator> a lot, and think­ing about him, and the funeral and the wake. I’ve also been think­ing about his rela­tion­ship with Joss and great lost loves and chances missed.

When I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been think­ing about this Free the Refugees stunt that Merlin Luck pulled on Big Brother. I think one of the most import­ant moments in this exchange has been the insist­ence by host Gretel Killeen that Luck acknow­ledge that voting is the “only” way to really influ­ence a gov­ern­ment and that as a non-cit­izen Luck didn’t have that power. It seems to me this is Killeen’s des­per­ate attempt to insist that rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy still func­tions. Luck, who very sens­ibly used sym­bolic refusal-to-speak as part of his ini­tial protest, echo­ing the denial-of-speech to the incar­cer­ated refugees, wasn’t as sharp as he could have been in his response to her on that one. He mis­in­ter­preted the debate as about nation­hood and pat­ri­ot­ism. It wasn’t. She was talk­ing sys­tems of power and change mech­an­isms. What he needed to say right then, but under­stand­ably didn’t make the con­nec­tion fast enough, was that in this par­tic­u­lar instance, the refugee issue, who he votes for is entirely irrel­ev­ant since neither party has a plat­form right now of ending man­dat­ory deten­tion. There­fore, media-savvy inter­ven­tions like this protest stunt *are* in fact the only pos­sible options in a world where media atten­tion and polls drive policy, at least to some extent. I think he did an amaz­ing job. Very brave. 

I went to the XDream gig at QBH on Sunday night. It was good to dance mind­lessly. I needed that. 

I spent all Monday watch­ing the Lord of the Rings tri­logy at the Astor. That was an amaz­ing jour­ney, poignant and beau­ti­ful. It made me think about hawk_eye and all I lost when our rela­tion­ship ended. You will always be my Aragorn. 

I spent yes­ter­day mark­ing stu­dent work.

And I made a few new RSS feeds: age_headlines and mel­bindy­media. The Age has a bunch of other RSS feeds avail­able now too.