Poetry and tragedy

The last few days have been intense.

Yes­ter­day after­noon, I graf­ted my way into Red vs Blue (“what do you mean it’s sold out? Surely Helen has put some tick­ets aside for journ­al­ists… see, here’s my MEAA card… Oh, Helen, hi there! Con­grat­u­la­tions! Sold out! That’s fab­ulous… Oh, tell them Dani­elle put tick­ets aside for journos? Of course, no problems.”)

The ses­sions were superb. An entirely dif­fer­ent exper­i­ence seeing them on the big screen, all at once, one after the other like a real movie. And the guys (Gus and Geoff were out here from Texas) were incred­ibly gen­er­ous with their time, answer­ing every ques­tion… I ended up sit­ting with my old pal Marcus West­bury (he freel­anced for me on inter​net​.au when he was a whip­per­snap­per, now he’s the artistic dir­ector of the Next Wave fest­ival) and his friend who writes for IT Alive in the Aus­tralian. One of the things I com­men­ted on was how RvB man­ages to walk the line between hys­ter­ic­ally funny and the usual homo­phobic sexist guff you get from gamer humour.

Midway through I got a phone call from one friend saying her grand­father had just died and got home to a mes­sage from another very close friend saying the same thing. You both know who you are and you are both in my thoughts.

This morn­ing did not start well: I parked behind a van, jumped off Astrid and dashed to Movie Reel to return a DVD. I came back five seconds later to see the van revers­ing to get out. Instead of revers­ing the foot he needed to and stop­ping, he kept going, straight over Astrid. She has an enorm­ous gaping hole in her fair­ing. I have his number and license plate and stuff but still!!! I was livid. 

Then I sat through some of the dullest anti-dis­crim­in­a­tion train­ing I have ever had the mis­for­tune to attend, with a woman whose gram­mar was so shock­ing it took me a few seconds some­times to decipher what she’d just said. She kept using nouns as verbs and verbs as nouns and there were double neg­at­ives all over the place. Sophia help anyone from a NESB trying to com­pre­hend her.

I was stressed in class. I had a brief chat with sleazemon­key at lunch who was also having a stressy day. In my after­noon con­sulta­tion, I had to coun­sel a stu­dent in tears and then I had my even­ing class, which was okay but rushed because they’ve upgraded the soft­ware I asked them to upgrade but I hadn’t thought about the implic­a­tions for re-set­ting up Dream­weaver for everybody.

Finally, after all that, I could­n’t face coming home and start­ing mark­ing, so I went to the gorgeus Wesley Anne up the road to listen to Ancient Mar­riage (Poetry and Music), another Over­load gig, this time with Paul Mitchell& Jumbuk, Andy Jackson& North Atlantic and Ian McBryde& Zaziz. Mitchell was utterly superb with a few pieces that made my jaw drop (one about a man hanging from a cliff upside down watch­ing crows and pray­ing to upside down stars that had echoes of Huginn and Muginn all through it and another about how the Word of God was stolen by a bag­snatcher and then imprisoned in a book by a priest…). Andy was dis­turb­ingly bril­liant with a first person piece about a delib­er­ate and care­ful full gen­ital cas­tra­tion. Oh, and Ian McBryde wasn’t just being friendly last time, thunderfoot23…

Got home and chat­ted to dai­syn­erd. Read e‑mail from another friend whose mother is uncon­scious and crit­ical after sur­gery for cancer – my thoughts are with you too. Read more lovely e‑mail from Brandon and day­dreamed about our week­end trip to the Blue Moun­tains. Booked my tick­ets to Sydney for the weekend.

It’s been a strange com­bin­a­tion of won­der­ful and awful. Now insanely late for little bird­ies wot must be up early to go to work. At least I’m still *doing* things.